


Crossing the Line

by sistercacao



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Angst, Disturbing Themes, Explicit Language, M/M, Sex, Violence, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-03-12 13:41:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 49,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13548498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistercacao/pseuds/sistercacao
Summary: The Homicide Department in Sanc City's 8th precinct has never been an easy beat, but this might be the worst winter of all. The new rookie cop, Trowa Barton, and his partner, Wufei Chang are dealing with a monstrous case, the high-profile murder of the billionaire CEO of Winner Enterprises. And a rash of disturbing murders in the slums bring back demons from detective Duo Maxwell's past that his partner, Heero Yuy, is afraid might consume him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LJ in 2011, but still ongoing! Note, chapters of this might undergo revision as it is still a work in progress, but the story arc will not change :)

 

 

Zipping up his coat, Detective Heero Yuy of Sanc City’s 8th Precinct turned against the wind and briefly wondered which vengeful deity had chosen him to be on duty on the coldest damn night of the year. He punctuated the thought with a sigh that puffed out as an icy-white cloud in front of him. Hands in pockets, he hunched down to the ground beside his partner, running his eyes over the form of the body sprawled face-down in the frozen street.   
  
Detective Duo Maxwell looked just as unhappy to be there as he was, shivering in a trench coat buttoned up to his neck. His hair, pulled up as ever in a long, heavy braid, curled down his back and dangled precariously just above the street where he crouched. He stared glumly at the face of the young man laid out before him, who met that stare with the glassy, impassive gaze of the recently deceased.  
  
“You’d think it was too fucking cold out for people to shoot each other,” Duo said with a half-cocked smile. “Or at least have the common courtesy to do it inside.”  
  
“What’s this guy’s name?”  
  
“Dunno. You wanna search the guy’s pockets? Be my guest. Gonna have to flip him first.”  
  
Heero gave the body a once-over. The man wore a thick winter jacket, conspicuously expensive, which now sported a large hole in the back, through which several downy feathers peeked out. Judging from the slushy pool of blood around the victim’s head, he was sporting another hole in that, too.   
  
He made a quick decision.  
  
“I’m not flipping him. I’ll wait for the ME.”  
  
“We should get the rookie to do it!” Duo was never one to let the cold get in the way of a little mischief. “Hey, Barton!”   
  
Sanc’s newest, shiniest homicide detective hurried over, breath fogging out around him, tall and lean in a black wool coat. A shock of brown hair fell gracefully over one jade-green eye. Duo liked to joke that Trowa appeared more glamour model than policeman.  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“We wanna see if this guy’s got any ID in his front pockets. Wanna roll him for us?”  
  
Trowa took a long look at the two of them, crouched on the ground with their hands stuffed deep in their coats, and sighed. “You just get a manicure or something?”  
  
“Yeah, man, don’t wanna chip a nail.”  
  
“What makes you think I want to get brains on my hands any more than you?”  
  
“No problem, his brains are all frozen to the ground anyway!”   
  
Seeing that he had managed to make both Trowa and Heero’s faces contort with disgust, Duo broke out into laughter.   
  
“I’m fucking with you, Trowa. Where the hell’s the ME, anyway? We’ve been out here a goddamn age.”  
  
“Sergeant Noin says fifteen minutes,” Trowa replied.  
  
“And if you can’t handle the wait, I suggest you do something useful with your time,” Noin broke in, walking over to the three men. Heero and Duo rose briskly at her approach.   
  
Tall and thin and strikingly attractive, she had taken a lot of shit to get where she was, catcalls and blank speculation on her ability to do a dirty job like murder investigation. She probably had those cops’ balls sitting in a jar somewhere in her office now. No one in her squad dared try any of that shit with her; she commanded absolute respect, albeit with a friendly demeanor that defied her solid-as-steel attitude underneath. Plus, as Heero could attest from the occasional spar at the station gym, she threw one hell of a punch.  
  
Now, standing in the icy street with half her squad chatting aimlessly around the victim’s body, she wore a look of weary authority. She didn’t want to be out here any more than the rest of them, but she  _had_  to be.   
  
“You could start with finding out if anyone saw who shot the guy.”  
  
Beyond the body and the small ring of police cars and uniformed officers surrounding the crime scene, a crowd had gathered to gawk at the blood and violence. Heero could hear the chatter of the onlookers drifting over from their police-mandated distance away, but paid it little notice. He knew that the minute he went over to talk to them they would shut up so fast he’d be lucky if he even got a “fuck you” out of anyone.   
  
Besides, they were more likely than not just there to take in the spectacle, the corpse on the ground and the flashing blue lights and the grim-faced men currently freezing their asses off outside. It wasn’t that a dead drug dealer lying on the streets at two in the morning was an uncommon sight in Sanc’s south side. No, this was practically a weekly source of entertainment. And if anyone had witnessed the murder, it wasn’t this gaggle of bored teenagers. They’d have more luck with the residents of the apartment building directly facing the intersection where the man was shot.  
  
Like so many of the buildings in this part of town, the building sported a dour, stained facade, and seemed to crouch menacingly over the street, as if challenging its tenants to enter. Behind ubiquitous steel bars, most of the apartment’s windows were dark, shuttered against the early morning cold and the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. But a few floors up, Heero spotted a middle-aged woman with her head out the window, taking in the view from above. Her eyes met his and in an instant she had retreated into her living room and slammed the window shut.   
  
The sergeant’s gaze had followed Heero’s up the building and, at the woman’s hasty exit, she gave him an encouraging pat on the shoulder.   
  
“Well, that’s a start! Take Maxwell with you so I don’t have to hear him complain anymore.”  
  
So Heero and Duo stalked across the street, bracing against the cutting wind, and trotted into the unheated lobby of the tenement. True to form, there was no elevator in the building, so the two dutifully trudged up several creaking, ancient flights of stairs, then down the musty, dark hallway that led to the woman’s place, and knocked on the door. Nobody answered.  
  
Heero and Duo shared a look, and knocked again.  
  
“Police, ma’am,” Duo called. That usually did the trick.  
  
Sure enough, the door opened to reveal the woman Heero had seen from the window, eyeing the two of them with naked distrust.  
  
“What do you want?”  
  
The woman had her greying brown hair arranged in a messy bun, and she smoothed out the wrinkles of her faded nightgown even as she glared at them. She was a woman of forty or fifty, but she carried a kind of weariness about her that didn’t suit her age at all. It was the exhaustion of living in this part of town; they didn’t call it the Drain for nothing. Given enough time, the crime, the drugs, and the general poverty of its residents permeated right through to their souls.  
  
Yet the minute a member of the force pledged to serve and protect these people showed up and tried to make things right, however briefly, it was an egregious affront to their sensibilities. How  _dare_  they try to make it safer to live here!  
  
“Ma’am, there was a homicide outside your apartment building at around one AM tonight,” Duo said, flashing his badge and receiving a pointedly indifferent reaction. If he was annoyed at her expression, though, it certainly didn’t show in his voice.   
  
“So?”  
  
“We were wondering if you saw something.”  
  
“I didn’t see nothin’. I don’t want to talk to no police.”   
  
She began to shut the apartment door. Heero reached out a hand and wrapped it around the door frame, blocking her attempt, and leveled her with a glare. He was too cold and tired for her antics.  
  
She leveled a glare of her own at his hand, then at him, and the two stared each other for a couple of seconds of pure, unfettered malice before Duo jovially cut in.  
  
“Ma’am, if you saw anything, it would really help us--”  
  
“-- I told you I ain’t talking to you!”  
  
“We could come back here with a court summons and make you talk,” Heero growled.  
  
“Then go get your damn summons! Until then, I ain’t talkin’!”  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, Heero saw Duo’s eyebrow twitch. He recovered quickly, however, and gave the lady a nonchalant shrug.  
  
“It’s your neighborhood.”  
  
“Yeah, it is.” She narrowed her eyes at Heero. “Now leave me alone.”  
  
With a frustrated grunt, he removed his hand from the door frame and was instantly rewarded with the door slamming in their faces. Duo sighed as they turned from the apartment and returned down the hall.  
  
“What’s with you and the good cop, bad cop thing, man?”  
  
“That lady must have witnessed something,” Heero muttered.  
  
“Maybe, but she won’t say a thing without a summons now, thanks to you, Yuy.”  
  
“She wasn’t going to say a damn thing regardless! Trying to get a statement out of anyone in the Drain is a waste of time.”  
  
“Still, you could stand to work on your people skills.”  
  
“Go fuck yourself.”  
  
“See what I mean?”   
  
They returned to the street and found the Medical Examiner had arrived and was busy loading the victim into the back of the morgue wagon. Trowa approached them, waving a careworn leather wallet in his rubber-gloved fingers.  
  
“Lorenzo D. Guadinigno,” he announced.  
  
Duo whistled. “That’s gonna be a hell of a tombstone.”  
  
“Better get used to spelling it, because I’m giving you two this case,” Noin said, watching the ME drive off down the street, Lorenzo D. Guadinigno safely stored inside his van. “You get anything out of that lady in the apartment?”  
  
“Oh yeah,” Duo replied. He made a show of pulling out his notepad and flipping it to the first blank page.   
  
“Let’s see. She didn’t see nothing, and she doesn’t want to talk to no police.”   
  
He flipped the book closed and pocketed it again.  
  
“Shmuck,” she said affectionately. “Come on, let’s get back to the station. I’m freezing my ass off out here.”  
  
They piled into their squad cars, Heero and Duo to one, Trowa and Sergeant Noin in the other. The various other uniforms followed suit, slipping into the blue-and-white marked vehicles dotting the intersection. With the body gone, the crowd around the crime scene had already begun to disperse, filtering away down side streets and alleys, their attention held only as long as the spectacle remained. After all, in another week, a different dealer would take up residence on this corner, hawking dope where days before a dead man had lain, and probably sooner rather than later, there would be another murder in the Drain, and the circus would start all over again. Life went on.   
  
That was the way it went in Sanc City.  
  
* * *   
  
“G... u... a... d... a...”  
  
“A-d- _i_ , Duo.”  
  
“Shit.” Duo erased the offending letter and replaced it with an ‘i’. “Maybe you should spell it out for me.”  
  
Heero picked the up the victim’s sheet from his desk and slowly read the name off the top.   
  
Duo dutifully copied it onto the whiteboard that sprawled across one wall of the precinct-- The Board, to the members of Homicide.  _Lorenzo Guadinigno_. Next to that, he inscribed the date and time of his murder, all in bright, shining, we-don’t-have-a-clue who-did-this-red.  
  
“All right, Mr. G,” Duo said brightly, capping the pen. “Looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of each other from now on.”   
  
It may have been six AM and still dark outside, and the two of them may have gotten, at most, three hours of sleep the night before, but Duo didn’t seem any worse for it, three coffees deep and raring to get a move-on with the case. They had a list of names, painfully short, of people who knew the victim, family members and friends and other dealers known to work with him, and hopefully among those names was someone who might be aware of who would want to shoot Lorenzo dead at one o’clock on a Tuesday morning. If they were especially lucky, they’d find the suspect on the list and kill two birds with one stone.  
  
And they could use the luck, Heero thought glumly. They were not sitting on an especially strong body of evidence so far. The medical examiner had recovered two .22 caliber bullets from the body, but little else in the way of physical evidence. Besides the possibility of the woman in the apartment building, they had no witnesses, and no idea where to start.   
  
It was a small comfort to see they were not the only detectives up so bright and early: a few desks over, Sally Po shuffled through a sizable collection of paperwork with Hilde Schbeiker, her new partner. She had a couple of names in red of her own up on the Board, holdovers from the Christmas season; holidays had a tendency to spike the murder rate in the city. Her former partner, Wufei Chang, had inherited a couple of his own when he had been teamed with Barton. Less than a month into the new year and everyone was already up to their elbows in dead people.   
  
Sally wore a suit jacket and pants over a blouse, looking for all the world like a junior trial lawyer about to go to court. Her hair was threaded into twists, framing an oval face that usually had dimples in it from smiling until her cheeks hurt, but now it was crumpled into a vague frown, as she went about the tedious business of getting her case work in order.  
  
Her new partner, Hilde Schbeiker, a New Year’s transfer from patrol, sat at the desk beside her, thumbing through a file with one hand and sipping from a thermos in the other. Heero couldn’t say too much about her with any certainty yet, but it hadn’t gone without notice that Noin had split the odd-couple partnership of Po and Chang up to pair Sally with the new girl. If Noin thought Hilde needed a benevolent, motherly type like Sally to look after her, it spoke volumes to her newness as a detective.   
  
Sally was older than them, yes, but by the police’s general standards, she was still a baby. That made the rest of them positively fetal by comparison. It was no secret that Homicide was regarded with a bit of awe and curiosity-- a bunch of kids, in the eyes of the forty and fifty-somethings that populated the majority of the other departments, that incidentally happened to be damn good cops, too. The Sanc City Times had used the phrase “wunderkind” more than once to describe their lot.   
  
Duo had one such op-ed cut out and posted to the side of his cubicle. “The New Face of the Police?” it read, rather ominously, and included a picture from a couple of years ago of the two of them at a press conference, Heero looking morose as he usually did when forced to interact with the press, and Duo smiling as if appearing before an audience of adoring fans. The article’s implication was, he gathered, that the city’s Homicide Department had been given over to naive, dubiously qualified adolescents. Hoodlums running amok at the Eighth Precinct. Duo had naturally found it hysterical.  
  
Also unusually young was the ringleader of their circus, Lieutenant Une, a woman who at her worst inspired allusions to certain infamous dictators of world wars past. They could always tell when the chain of command was breathing down her neck by the sound of her voice bellowing through the closed door of her office. More often than not, the person receiving the full force of her temper was Heero’s partner, who tended to regard paperwork as a blight on his existence and shirked the responsibility whenever possible.  
  
But, however strict and authoritative her personality, all of them had to admit she kept Homicide running like a well-oiled machine, no small feat in a city with over two hundred murders a year. She was most likely the reason they were still regarded as wunderkind prodigies and not outright delinquents. And she got up at the crack of dawn with the rest of them. Heero could see light emanating from under the closed door of her office.   
  
Duo returned to their shared desk and slumped into his chair.   
  
“You know, making house calls in the Drain is  _not_  how I wanted to start my day.”  
  
“With any luck, we’ll close the case.”  
  
Duo snorted. “I’ll consider us lucky if this guy’s own sister even confesses to knowing him.”  
  
“It would be a start.” Heero stood up, pulling his coat off the cubicle wall and shrugging it on. “Let’s head out.”  
  
* * * *  
  
They arrived at the last known residence of Lorenzo D. Guadinigno before seven o’clock, but this was a house that had experienced the murder of a loved one mere hours before, and they were not surprised to find the door opened by a young woman in full dress and makeup, as if preparing to step out for an early-morning dance party. They saw this same incongruity countless times at countless homes; when this girl had left the house last night, her brother had been alive. And when she returned home, everything had changed. There was no time to change clothes, no time to do much of anything except reel in the face of the tragedy, until being spurred to move by the two detectives ringing the doorbell at a quarter to seven.   
  
“Morning,” she mumbled, with a look of anguished comprehension on her face-- more men coming to tell her more good news, surely. She pulled at the hem of her party dress, her stockinged feet shying away from the cold at the edge of the door.   
  
“Ms. Rebecca Guadinigno?” Duo pulled out his badge as he spoke. She gave it a partial glance. Of course they were police, who else would they be?  
  
“That’s right.”   
  
“We need to ask you a few questions. May we come inside?”  
  
She stared at them for a few moments before seeming to come to a personal conclusion.  
  
“Guess so,” she said, turning from the door.   
  
Heero and Duo followed her inside to a modest living room, where an older woman sat on a sagging couch, clad in a robe and a long, threadbare cotton dress-- the grandmother Lorenzo had lived with, according to their information. She regarded them with the same calm, desolate air of her granddaughter, and did not introduce herself.  
  
“Ma’am,” Duo said by way of greeting. “We are very sorry for your family’s loss.”  
  
The woman, her hands folded in her lap, only nodded, her mouth a pressed, sorrowful line across her face.  
  
“Rest assured that the police are working hard to solve your grandson’s murder. We’re here to ask some questions that might help our investigation.”  
  
The girl, who had planted herself in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, looked ready to bolt. She glanced furtively toward her grandmother, as if to silently convey her intentions, but whatever she saw in her eyes seemed to make her change her mind. It was an interesting feat, since Heero could detect no shift in the grandmother’s expression, but all the same, the girl shuffled further into the room and took a seat beside the woman on the couch.  
  
She was going to lie to them, Heero thought with a twinge of frustration. Everyone lied, and it was especially true in the Drain, but she was going to lie about everything purely out of principle. Something in her grandmother’s demeanor had her tethered to the couch, but he could see the wheels turning in her head all the same.   
  
Well, that might prove to be of some help after all. Was she protecting somebody? Herself? His cynical side reminded him that she could have been the one to pull the trigger, however unlikely that might be. He had seen family members play at grief before.  
  
Heero cleared his throat. He’d start small.  
  
“When was the last time you saw Lorenzo?”  
  
“Last night sometime,” the girl mumbled. “I went out at eleven or so and he wasn’t around.”  
  
Well, that sounded truthful enough.  
  
“Did you know what his plans for the evening were?”  
  
“No,” she muttered, staring off into half space.   
  
That was more like it.  
  
“Did Lorenzo have any enemies? Or friends he recently fought with?”  
  
The older woman let out a small, restrained sigh. Rebecca looked at her, then at the detectives.  
  
“I don’t know. Don’t think so.”  
  
The names on their list were mostly family, but a few numbers scribbled onto paper and tucked into Lorenzo’s wallet had given them the names of a few unaccounted-for acquaintances-- buddies, maybe, or girlfriends, or drug contacts. Heero had a hunch Rebecca knew those names, too.  
  
“Did anything strange happen recently? Phone calls late at night, people showing up at the house unexpectedly, anything like that?”  
  
Rebecca made a hemming noise, as if trying to remember some long-forgotten instance. “I don’t remember nothing like that ever happening,” she said finally.  
  
The grandmother’s hands clenched into the fabric of her dress. Heero caught the movement and held on to it.  
  
“Was there a change to his schedule or behavior? Did he start seeing anyone new, or hanging out with a different group of friends?”  
  
Those hands twisted and he knew he was onto something. Rebecca stared out at nothing for a minute, wheels turning and turning.   
  
She began to speak. “He didn’t have a--”  
  
“-- I knew this would happen.”   
  
The grandmother’s voice was nearly a whisper. Her eyes fell to her lap, where her hands were bunching into fists in her dress.  
  
“Grandmama!” Rebecca cried, turning frantically to gawk at her.  
  
“I knew it,” she continued. “I knew it ever since he started seeing that girl.”  
  
“Grandmama, stop!”  
  
“Girl, ma’am?” Duo pressed. Heero mentally scrolled through the list of names they had compiled. There had been a few female names on there, two of them belonging to the people who sat before them now. The others...  
  
“I told him she was bad news,” the woman continued, oblivious to the looks her granddaughter was shooting her at her side. Her gaze, though ostensibly settled on her ringing hands, was a thousand miles away, looking backwards in time to a moment where, perhaps, she could have prevented this outcome, could have convinced her grandson-- whose mother was dead and whose father was incarcerated, they knew-- not to turn down the path that had inevitably led her here, to sit on her couch while two men in suit pants and ties asked her questions about the death of her own flesh and blood, and led to him lying shelved in a locker in the autopsy room of a police station basement.   
  
“With the drugs and the gangs... I told him not to see that Blake girl anymore. I told him...”  
  
Melanie Blake, one of the names on the list, and now, a description to go with the name: girlfriend. Bad news. Drugs. Gangs.  
  
“Was Lorenzo with Melanie last night?”   
  
“Melanie didn’t do nothin’!” Rebecca cut in, and now her evasion made some sense. Melanie was a friend, and Melanie might be in trouble. “Her shit-head ex Ray--” she cut herself off, covering her mouth with her hands, but she had give quite enough away.  
  
“Rebecca,” Heero said now, staring her down, “tell us what you know about Melanie Blake’s ex-boyfriend.”  
  
She shook her head forcefully. A wrinkled hand shot out and grabbed her by the wrist, and her grandmother turned to her with stern authority in her gaze.  
  
“Tell the policemen, Becca.”  
  
“But Melanie--”  
  
“Lorenzo was your  _brother_ , child. He was  _blood_.”  
  
The girl gave her grandmother a long, empty stare, and then a single, solemn nod. Slowly, she began to talk, the old woman’s hand never releasing its grip.  
  
“Melanie was going out with Ray-- uh, Raymond DeWitt-- before she and Lorenzo got together. Got a baby with him. He... got mad when she started dating Lorenzo. They worked the same turf, but they were never friends. Melanie got back with Ray a couple months ago. They have a baby, you know? But in the end, she picked my brother and Ray... started to say he was gonna get him for it.”  
  
Duo had pulled his notepad out and scribbled notes as the girl spoke. She watched his pen move across paper and leaned hastily forward in her grandmother’s grip.  
  
“Melanie didn’t think he was serious! She didn’t know that he would... he would actually...” Her mouth pressed down hard, and she blinked a few times and said no more.  
  
Heero gave her a minute to compose herself before he spoke.   
  
“Does Raymond DeWitt own a gun?”  
  
The girl flinched.   
  
“Y-yeah.” She stared down at an indeterminate point on the floor, her shoulders bowed. “Mel said he... he took it out once when they were fighting. He pointed it at her while she was holding the baby. T-that’s why she left the first time.”  
  
First-degree murderers had a way of escalating their crimes; rarely was it ever a first-time offender who killed another in cold blood. Raymond DeWitt, it seemed, had the rap sheet of a real bona fide creep, a drug dealer who threatened his girlfriend at gunpoint when she pissed him off.   
  
And yet, she hadn’t taken him seriously when he’d started threatening her new boyfriend. Was it because he hadn’t actually pulled that trigger on her the last time he’d made those kinds of threats? Even living in a part of town where murder was all but commonplace, perhaps she just didn’t want to believe that someone she knew, someone whose baby she was raising, could be capable of something so terrible.  
  
They had just about all the information they could use from someone who wasn’t a direct witness to the crime. Heero straightened; Duo stowed his notebook and pen back in his coat pocket.  
  
“Don’t worry, Melanie isn’t in trouble for anything,” Heero told the girl.   
  
She gave him a weak nod that he returned. Her grandmother’s wrinkled hand slipped from her forearm to pat her knee in reassurance that she had done the right thing.  
  
“Thank you both for your help.”  
  
They saw themselves out.  
  
Duo managed to make it the rest of the way to the car before he let his exuberance show.   
  
“Holy shit, was that a miracle or what?” he crowed in the passenger’s seat, giving Heero’s shoulder a tight squeeze. “Not in a million years did I think we were going to hit a home run like that on this case.”  
  
“We don’t have him yet.”  
  
“Hell, Heero, would it kill you to be a little optimistic? We just gotta get the guy’s address and we’re golden! The kid will buckle in interrogation and we’ll have the whole thing ironed out by the end of shift today.”  
  
Duo stared at him with such a goofy, overjoyed grin that Heero found himself helplessly smiling back. It was hard not to get caught up in his partner’s enthusiasm, though he was not nearly as sure the case would be tied up so easily.   
  
Still, it felt good to get thrown a line, after waking up in the morning without even a witness to start with.  
  
“Let’s call this guy’s info in,” Heero said, “and give him a visit.”  
  
* * * *  
  
“He ain’t here.”  
  
Raymond Dewitt’s mother stood with her arms crossed in the doorway of her house. Early forties, hair hanging loose and uncombed around the shoulders of her faded robe, she inspected them with abject indifference.   
  
“Any idea when he’ll be back?” Duo pressed.  
  
“No. He didn’t come home last night.” She gestured with one hand in their direction. “And now the police are askin’ me where he is. What stupid shit did he do now?”  
  
“When was the last time you saw him?”   
  
“Ten, eleven? He came back to get his coat before he went out again all damn night.”  
  
“What kind of coat?”  
  
“Big red puffy jacket. It’s got a bulldog on the back.”  
  
“Oh, a Mutts fan, huh?” Duo asked, perking up. “I’m a Spacers man, myself. But I recognize talent where I see it. That pitcher Martinez sure is something, huh?”  
  
“I wouldn’t know.”  
  
“It’s all in the wrist, ma’am. The starter, Polk, he’s got an arm on him, sure, but Martinez has the  _technique_. He’s got finesse. They’ve got that other guy, Wilkes, but he’s just okay. Martinez is the real talent.”  
  
Heero cut in before Duo devolved into listing off the entire team’s lineup on the front porch of a murder suspect’s house. “Listen, ma’am, if he comes back, tell him he needs to come by the station.”   
  
He pulled his card out and handed it over to the woman, who accepted it with only mild interest. She stepped inside and pushed the door closed without another word to them.  
  
They stalked back to their car in a significantly more somber mood than they had left it.  
  
“So much for clearing the case by the end of our shift,” Duo muttered. “We need to put a call in on this guy.”  
  
Fifteen minutes later, every uniform and patrolman in Sanc was on the lookout for a mid-twenties kid with a buzz cut and a red Mutts jacket. Raymond Dewitt, wherever he was hiding, was officially a wanted man.   
  
All that was left to do was return to headquarters and wait.  
  
And for how long? Well, that was up to how good Raymond was at staying unseen. They just had to hope it would be sooner, rather than later, that he got caught.  
  
* * * *  
  
“Howard! Another round for the boys!”  
  
“We’re here too, shithead,” Noin said, jerking a thumb toward Sally and Hilde at her end of the table.   
  
“Sorry, Noin. Hey, Howard! Another round for the ladies, too!”  
  
“Shmuck.”   
  
“Lay off, will you? It’s been a long day.”   
  
Duo pushed his fourth empty mug of beer rather forcefully away from him. Heero reached out to steady it before it rolled off the table and shattered to the floor.  
  
Trowa took a modest sip from his glass. “I thought your case was in the bag? Didn’t the vic’s sister finger someone for the shooting?”  
  
Duo’s voice, louder with every beer, drowned out the muffled cheering of the baseball game on the TV and the general din of the bar. “Yeah, but the asshole is roaming around Sanc somewhere, so we had to wait at the station all damn day!”   
  
Wufei, crammed into the corner seat between Sally and Trowa, took his attention off of the game for a moment to shoot Duo a blank look.   
  
“Wow, that must have been so hard for you,” he intoned.  
  
“Well, while  _you_  were getting your beauty sleep last night, some of us were out working until the goddamn crack of dawn,” Duo shot back. He looked to Trowa. “I don’t know how you put up with him.”  
  
“Hey, I seemed to do a pretty good job of it,” Sally said.  
  
“Patience of a saint, both of you.”  
  
Hilde leaned forward in her chair.   
  
“Don’t worry, Duo, they’ll find the guy in a day, tops.”   
  
Her overt sympathy made Wufei roll his eyes theatrically back in his head, though he made sure to conceal it from her direct line of sight. Noin snorted and slapped Hilde lightly on the back.  
  
“Watch out, that’s how he gets people to buy his drinks.”  
  
“Why do you have to reveal all my secrets to the rookies, huh, Noin? I’m gonna lose my captivating air of mystery if you keep this up.”  
  
“I’ve heard there’s a cream for that.”  
  
Howard arrived with fresh beers and ubiquitous Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. Today he wore red with penguins lounging under little embroidered palm trees. Heero sometimes wondered if Howard could even locate Hawaii on a map. It was certainly nowhere near Antarctica.   
  
Duo immediately clambered up to take the heavy mugs from Howard’s hands, but Heero, the designated driver and therefore eminently more sober than his partner, pushed him back into his chair and passed everyone their drinks himself.   
  
His hands free, Howard clapped Duo on the shoulder as the detective took an ample swig of his fifth glass of beer.  
  
“You’ve got a ride home, right?”  
  
“I’m taking him home,” Heero cut in. Duo put his glass back down on the table and nodded emphatically.  
  
“He’s taking care of me tonight, Howard!”  
  
Howard snorted and began collecting the empty mugs on the table, most of them huddled in a little arc around Duo.   
  
“Yeah, tonight and every night. Don’t know how you put up with his shit, Heero,” he said, breaking into a frizzy goateed grin before leaving the table.  
  
Wufei gleefully picked up where Howard left off. “Must have the patience of a saint, right?”  
  
“Eat shit.”  
  
“If only he got a paycheck for babysitting you. Oh wait, he usually  _does_.”  
  
Heero cut in with a warning tone. “Wufei...”   
  
“Personally, I’d have requested a transfer after the first excessive force complaint, but I guess Yuy’s charitable streak runs wider than mine.”  
  
The table went silent. Sally, never the best poker face, whirled to stare at Wufei, dark eyes saucers in her head. Noin’s gaze flickered to Duo, then to Wufei, but she didn’t say a word. Heero, for his part, just glared at Chang across the table, though the hand not clenched in a fist on his lap was ready to reach out and subdue Duo if needed. Wufei sat with arms defiantly crossed, in direct challenge to Duo and the rest of the group. Hilde and Trowa merely watched, only aware that a line had just been crossed between the two detectives.  
  
For a minute, nobody spoke, all eyes on Duo. The sudden silence at the always rowdy table had even brought Howard’s attention back to them, and he stared from his place behind the bar as Duo took a slow, even sip of his beer, his narrowed eyes never leaving Chang’s.  
  
When he finally spoke, it was with quiet, deliberate gravity:  
  
“You really need to get laid, Chang.”  
  
There was a collective exhale of breath around the table. Heero unclenched his fists, the rigidity leaving his back and the set of his jaw.  
  
Wufei, for his part, merely cocked an eyebrow and leaned back in his chair.  
  
“I could say the same to you--”  
  
“--I think we could  _all_  stand to get laid, gentlemen!” Noin interrupted, before they could get going again, and raised her glass. Her six detectives joined her in the toast, and by the end of the night Wufei was buying Duo his drinks in unspoken apology.  
  
* * * *  
  
“I really appreciate this, Yuy,” Duo slurred. His hand rose from his lap to clasp weakly on Heero’s shoulder. “You’re a really great guy, always looking out for me like this.” He slumped further into the car’s passenger’s seat. It was a wonder he wasn’t on the floor by now.  
  
They were two streetlights from Duo’s house, and he always got like this when he started to recognize the scenery and realized that Heero had driven him home from Howard’s again.   
  
Heero’s hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel.  
  
“It’s nothing.”  
  
“Not really,” said his partner, fixing Heero with a barely-conscious gaze. “At the very least, you’re saving me a hell of a lot on taxi fare.”  
  
“So buy my drinks next time.”   
  
Heero concentrated on keeping his tone ambivalent. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed that accepting Duo’s gratitude-- hell, even acknowledging it-- would be revealing something significant to his partner. So he acted like Duo was a moron just for saying thank you.  
  
They passed another stoplight and Heero turned onto Duo’s street, stealing a glance in his direction to see the detective had turned his head to stare out the window. His mouth was caught in a little smile and Heero stared at it until he felt compelled to watch the road again.  
  
And then they were outside Duo’s apartment building and it was time to say goodnight.  
  
“Thanks again, Heero,” Duo said, his hand on the door.  
  
Heero grunted.   
  
Duo fumbled with the door for a second before he managed to open it. Then came the brief struggle to right himself and stand up. Once safely upright in the street, he turned back to Heero and leaned in to speak.  
  
“See you tomorrow.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
With a drunken grin, Duo shut the door and jogged across the street, hopping over a pile of accumulated snow on the curb, braid trailing along behind him. Heero watched him climb cautiously up his building’s steps before disappearing into the lobby.   
  
He stayed on the street with his car idling gruffly in the cold air until the light in Duo’s apartment-- number 212, overlooking the street-- came on, confirming to him that Duo had made it upstairs safely.   
  
Now, he would stalk off to bed, probably forgetting to shut the lights off again. He’d probably be asleep before he even hit the mattress. And he probably would be completely unconscious until the very moment his alarm clock roused him for work again in the morning.  
  
He really should have left by now. Duo had made it upstairs without breaking his neck. His already-shaky justification for loitering any longer was officially exhausted with the flicker of the lights coming on in that upstairs apartment.  
  
Instead, Heero stayed, staring up at that yellow-tinted window, and wondered what shape his partner had made it to bed in. Had he even managed to remove his jacket? Had he turned back the sheets, or just sprawled on top of them?   
  
He thought about what Duo might look like tomorrow, haggard and unshaven, his tie on crooked and his shirt tucked haphazardly into his slacks. He thought about the dark circles that would frame those purple eyes, that look he would level on him as he strolled in with an enormous cup of coffee-- ‘don’t start’, it would say.   
  
He thought about Duo’s warm hand clasping his shoulder, the drunken smile that crept across his handsome face as he mumbled words of gratitude from the passenger seat.   
  
He thought about the irony of getting to call himself Duo’s partner without ever getting closer to him than sitting outside his apartment in the middle of the night.   
  
That’s enough, he chided himself. For tonight, that was enough.  
  
With one last glance upward toward 212, he put his car into gear and drove off down the street.  
  
* * * *  
  
Waiting for Raymond Dewitt to turn up left them with time on their hands. They spent that time bringing people to the station for statements. The woman in the apartment overlooking the crime scene managed to recall, with the mnemonic of a court summons to aid her, that she had witnessed a young man in a red jacket running down the street immediately after she heard the gunshots that killed Lorenzo Guadinigno.   
  
They brought the victim’s sister back to sign a statement corroborating what she had said to them on her living room couch. They even rounded up Melanie Blake, got a statement from her, just to make sure they had it on two people’s word that Raymond had a gun in his possession and had used it to threaten her life once before. Until they had that gun in their hands and were able to verify it shot the two .22 caliber bullets that killed Lorenzo, those statements were the most compelling evidence they had.  
  
The day after Melanie had been brought in, Heero and Duo sat at their shared desk and filed the case work into something resembling a coherent report. Wufei and Trowa typed at their computers, reviewing old cases from December and beyond that had gained little in the way of new leads in the weeks following. Hilde and Sally were at court to testify in another case that hailed from the Drain, and Noin with them.   
  
The lull of shuffling papers and typing reports was broken by a uniformed officer approaching their desk to say someone was on the line for Detective Maxwell. Duo was up in a second, throwing his partner a look of tense excitement as he moved to follow the officer to the phone.  
  
“This has to be it!”  
  
“Let’s hope so,” Heero replied.  
  
He watched Duo cross the room to the far end and pick up the phone there. There was a quick exchange of pleasantries, too far away for Heero to catch. Heero turned his attention back to the case work and waited for Duo to return.  
  
He did not expect the look he found on Duo’s face when he came back.  
  
“What?” he said immediately.  
  
Duo slumped heavily into his chair and ran his hands up over his face.   
  
“They found Raymond Dewitt.”   
  
“So what’s the problem?”  
  
“The problem is he’s apparently spent the last couple of days swimming at the bottom of the Florentine River. He’s dead."


	2. Chapter 2

“This blows,” Duo muttered, kicking a branch down the bank toward the river, where it skidded unsatisfactorily across the veneer of ice coating the water. “Fucking goddamn shit-fuck.”    
  
Heero turned to the on-scene officers, ignoring his partner’s litany of epithets behind them.   
  
“Who found him?”  
  
“A jogger saw something red under the ice from up on the road. We were first on the scene.” The officer barked a laugh. “Had to use a damn chainsaw to cut him out.”  
  
“How the hell did he get in there?”  
  
“I reckon he swan-dived.” The second officer now chuckled with the first.  
  
Heero was in no mood for frivolity. His temper was dark and he felt more apt to start cursing and causing minor crime scene destruction like his partner than to crack any jokes.   
  
Their suspect, their whole fucking case, lay half-frozen in the Florentine, currently being extracted very slowly by an overly methodical ME. While Heero glared ineffectually out at the suspect-swallowing river, Duo jumped on the balls of his feet, impatiently waiting for the body to be pulled out so they could scour it, looking for the only piece of evidence that could outrank the confession they were now never going to get: Raymond’s gun.  
  
The examiner had offered them his preliminary observation that Raymond Dewitt had been under the ice for at least 48 hours. That meant he had died the night of the murder, or very early the next morning. Hopefully, that meant the gun was still in the kid’s possession. If not, they were out a murder weapon and a confession, and their case would close without ever having charged a suspect. It didn’t sit well on Heero’s conscience.   
  
Duo turned to his partner with a grimace. “Why the fuck did Raymond come out here? The Drain is a good two miles west, not to mention the river is fucking frozen.”  
  
“Maybe he came to ditch the gun.”  
  
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to sell it, or wipe it and throw it in the garbage? Why come all the way out here in the middle of the night?” He shook his head, scanning the river. “Something’s not right with this picture. This ice is thick enough to skate on, how the hell did this kid manage to make a big enough hole to drop a gun into, let alone fall in?”  
  
“What are you saying?”  
  
“I’m saying it isn’t adding up to me. And until the ME pulls him out and has him on the autopsy table we’ve got nothing better to do than wildly speculate, right?”  
  
“I don’t think it’s wild speculation. You’re right, there’s something strange about it.”  
  
“Uh oh, Yuy, that sounded almost agreeable. Are you feeling okay?”  
  
“Shut up,” Heero said, but a smile played at the corner of his lips in spite of the depressing turn of events. Duo laughed and patted him on the back, and the two of them waited in the cold for Raymond Dewitt to be exhumed and hauled back to the station.  
  
* * * *  
  
Trowa sighed and took a break from typing to rub at his wrists. It was a slow day, quiet in the office, and he and his partner were the only ones at their desks. Duo and Heero were gone to investigate their suspect’s abrupt demise, Sally, Hilde, and Noin at court. They were left entirely to their own devices, and Trowa was thinking of leaving his report for another few hours and taking a long lunch break with Wufei.   
  
He was about to suggest this plan of action aloud when Lieutenant Une came storming out of her office and made a grim beeline their way.   
  
“You two, come with me.”  
  
She made no motion to slow down, continuing briskly toward the elevators, leaving Trowa and Wufei to scramble for their coats and run after her.  
  
“Where are we going, Lieutenant?”  
  
“Hawthorne Park West.”   
  
She jammed the down button with impatience, not bothering to acknowledge the surprise in her detectives’ expressions.  
  
Hawthorne Park was where Sanc’s elite lived, in apartments that cost more in upkeep than Trowa would ever see in his life. People there paid millions to stay sequestered from the more dangerous elements of city living-- elements that necessitated their jobs, elements like murder.   
  
A homicide at Hawthorne Park guaranteed a few things. One, the media would be there long before they were. Two, there was going to be a magnifying glass bearing down hot on their necks from the minute they stepped inside the crime scene to the end of the trial.  
  
And three, the day was about to get a lot more exciting.   
  
The two of them piled into one car, Lieutenant Une driving her own, and she relayed the directions even as she peeled out of the parking garage. 66 Hawthorne Park West, the kind of address you couldn’t enter without a chauffeured vehicle and a working pedigree.   
  
Trowa had a solid set of working class roots, and it gave him a strange sort of satisfaction to imagine the look that might cross the concierge’s face at being forced to tolerate the presence of plebeians like them wandering the opulent halls of their ivory-tower murder scene.  
  
The place was a madhouse when they arrived. At the foot of the luxuriant marble-and-gold apartment building swarmed a horde of news vehicles and flashing police cars. A crew of uniformed officers, already looking overwhelmed, held back a crush of reporters and rubberneckers. Une pulled up on the far side and flew past the waving microphones without a second glance, and Trowa and Wufei did their best to follow suit, speaking lowly to each other under the din of the crowd.  
  
“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” Trowa muttered.  
  
“This is a lot of attention for a random killing, even for Hawthorne.” Wufei dropped his voice to barely a whisper. “I think Une’s keeping something from us.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Look at this circus. Whoever died up there is high-profile. Maybe even a celebrity.”  
  
They stepped into the lobby, which gleamed like a diamond from the ceiling to the floor. Une stood at the elevators, cell phone in hand, a gaggle of uniforms around her. She clicked her phone shut as they approached.  
  
“I just pulled Noin out of court, she’s on her way. Listen, I need to tell you two something.”  
  
“It is a celebrity,” Wufei said, proud of himself.  
  
“Actually, it’s worse. The victim is the CEO of Winner Enterprises.”  
  
“Winner Enterprises, as in--”  
  
“--As in the Winner Stadium, yes. They also constructed Police Headquarters and the Sanc Opera House, if you’re curious. And the CEO was personal friends with Commissioner Darlian. Do I need to go on, or do you have an idea of how seriously we need to take this case?”  
  
“No, I think we have an idea,” Trowa replied.  
  
“Good. You two go on up, I’m going to deal with the vultures outside and wait for Noin to get here.” She marched out of the lobby without waiting for a response.  
  
The detectives were directed to the top floor, a private complex that required a key to travel to. So, the Winner CEO preferred to keep himself sequestered from even the other exorbitantly wealthy tenants.  
  
Mr. Winner’s penthouse apartment boasted a panoramic view of historical Hawthorne Park, not that he would be getting much enjoyment out of it now. Still, Trowa reasoned, that didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy it a little in his stead. He lingered at the enormous window at one end of the hallway and took in the scene that people in his income bracket did not often get to see.  
  
Wufei stood in front of the full-floor apartment, the door propped wide open as police hurried in and out, and waited impatiently for Trowa to join him.  
  
“We’re not getting paid to sight-see, you know,” he said eventually.  
  
“Relax,” Trowa said, but pulled himself away from the window all the same and joined his partner at the door. “The guy’s not going anywhere.”  
  
“Save the jokes for a case where the victim’s net worth is under a billion, please.”  
  
They stalked through the apartment’s spacious foyer, passing an enormous dining room and kitchen. Trowa was no art aficionado, but some of the pieces he saw hanging on the walls practically screamed their price tags to him. He peeked into a bathroom on their way through to the crime scene and found it contained a full marble tub and a painted ceiling. It seemed that, with enough money, you could piss in your own personal Sistine Chapel.  
  
The door to the bedroom was clogged with police and CSIs photographing the scene. Trowa and Wufei politely fought their way through the throng until they found themselves in the center of the room, staring down at the dead man sprawled on the floor.  
  
Frank Winner, CEO of Winner Enterprises, owner of an apartment with one of the best views of Hawthorne Park that money could buy, lay face down in his thick pile carpet, his arms splayed out to his sides, clad in an expensive suit which now sported a deep red stain. The back of his head had been heavily bludgeoned, massacred really, and his knuckles were bloody and raw, like he had hit someone hard in an attempt to fight back.   
  
Not far from his body lay the evident murder weapon-- a heavy geometric sculpture currently getting its picture taken from every available angle by one of the CSIs.   
  
Blood pooled into the carpet around the victim’s head and trailed a meandering path to the statue. No blood on the walls, or bed, or in the hallway outside the bedroom; whatever fight Mr. Winner had put up hadn’t lasted long. The rest of the apartment was pristine. No drawers hanging wide open, nothing pulled down from the cabinets in the kitchen or torn out of the walls. Those obscenely expensive paintings still hung undisturbed in the hallway. This was not the crime scene of a robbery. In fact, it seemed most likely that Mr. Winner had recognized his killer and had let him into his apartment of his own volition.  
  
They asked around for any witnesses that may had been identified. If there was one good thing about a murder in a part of town like this, it was that people here talked to the police. In the lobby, the police had corralled a small huddle of tenants tripping over themselves to give up information, no matter how minor or irrelevant. Trowa left his partner upstairs and took on the task of whittling these people down to only those with trivialities vaguely pertinent to the investigation: a woman who had been in the lobby at around the time the murder was taking place, a couple who lived on the floor below who reported they heard loud noises above them that had sounded like a fight between two or more men.   
  
More importantly, the doorman said that no one unusual had been in or out of the main entrance all morning. That left the garage to investigate.  
  
When Wufei joined him in the lobby, he was still scribbling notes in his pad.  
  
“We’re going to need copies of all the surveillance tapes. The doorman says he didn’t see anything. Any news from upstairs?”  
  
“Blunt force trauma to the head, defensive wounds on the hands, time of death is approximately two hours before the housekeeper found him.”  
  
“All right, doorman and housekeeper are coming to headquarters, then. Anyone else?”  
  
“We’ll have to take a trip over to his office and speak to his secretary. The housekeeper says he has a teenage son who lives with him, too. The kid’s at school right now, we can pick him up in the afternoon.”  
  
“Does he know?”  
  
Wufei shrugged.  
  
“Poor kid.”  
  
“Chang! Barton!”   
  
Lieutenant Une trotted in through the lobby door, Sergeant Noin behind her. Her expression was fierce, her mouth a line of frustration. She had been outside with the press for an hour, and it showed.  
  
“What’s the status in here?”  
  
“We’re about done,” Wufei said. “But I want to have a look around the garage before we go.”  
  
“Good. Listen, I’m making you the preliminary on this case.”  
  
Wufei’s eyes went wide. “You are?”  
  
“Yes, so don’t fuck it up.”   
  
She walked away to make a call. Succinct and blunt. Trowa rather liked her.  
  
Noin clasped a hand on Wufei’s shoulder and smiled. “Congratulations, Chang. I know you’ve wanted this for a long time.”  
  
Wufei smiled back, though he seemed a little shell-shocked from the declaration. Here was the most high-profile case they had perhaps ever been handed, and he was going to be in charge of it. Trowa could understand the delayed reaction.  
  
Personally, he was looking forward to a break from the boredom of the office. Well, that and all the overtime pay. Not enough to afford a penthouse at 66 Hawthorne Park West, but it might be enough for a motorcycle.  
  
He chuckled at himself as they headed for the building’s garage. That was why he’d never be rich. Short term gains always trumped long-term stability.  
  
* * * *  
  
“This place gives me the fucking creeps.”  
  
“Duo, be quiet.”  
  
“I’m serious. There are bodies in these lockers, Yuy. I’m sure Dr. Georgios is a real swell guy, but he hangs out in a refrigerator for people all damn day. He can’t be totally right in the head. Don’t matter how long I work in Homicide, I’ll  _still_  hate coming down here.”  
  
They stood in the hallway outside the autopsy room, a sterile expanse of white tile that took up much of the station’s basement. In front of them stood a large window that afforded them a view into the ‘refrigerator for people’, where an examination table hosted the body of Raymond Dewitt, naked beneath a sterile white sheet, as Dr. Georgios, the chief medical examiner, prepared it for autopsy.  
  
They hadn’t found the gun on Dewitt’s body. It was most likely tumbling against the rocks somewhere on the bottom of the Florentine river, lost to them barring an expensive search that would probably never get approved with their meager budget. It appeared more and more likely with every unfortunate turn of events that the Guadinigno case would close without the police ever formally naming a suspect.   
  
More disconcerting was the feeling that had nagged Heero all the way back from the morning crime scene to the station, that had led to standing outside the autopsy room with his partner, waiting for Dr. G to give them the go-ahead to come inside.   
  
It didn’t seem likely that Raymond had drowned in the river by accident. Moreover, they hadn’t come up with a plausible reason why he would be there the same night he shot Lorenzo at all.   
  
No, if their hunch was correct, the autopsy would soon be confirming that Raymond DeWitt had been dead before he ever arrived at the Florentine.   
  
The door to the room opened and Dr. Georgios popped his head out into the hall. His usual dome-like eruption of hair was stuffed into a surgical cap, his gloved hands and white medical robe affecting him the aura of a mad scientist. Duo loved to point it out to his partner whenever they consulted him.  
  
“You may come in now,” he said.  
  
Duo swallowed a grimace and followed him inside, Heero close behind. They walked to one side of the table, out of the edge of the blinding white light beaming down on the body. Raymond Dewitt’s glassy eyes stared up at them from behind a pallor of green, waxy skin.   
  
“I have something interesting to show you,” Dr. G said.  
  
He pulled the white sheet back and tucked it around the body’s shoulders, then pressed a gloved finger to the neck, where a series of off-color oval bruises stood out in stark contrast to the ashen complexion of the surrounding skin.  
  
“Take a look at these marks here. Four on each side, two in the middle. Just like this.”  
  
The doctor put his hands up, thumbs together, fingers cradled slightly inward as if curled around an object-- a neck.  
  
“Strangulation marks.”   
  
“Right. The body shows textbook signs of manual strangulation-- damage to the larynx, broken blood vessels in the eyes, and of course the marks you can see on the neck. I examined the victim’s lungs, and no water. He was dead before he made it into the river.”  
  
“Well, it looks like we were right,” Duo muttered. “Another homicide. How lucky for us.”  
  
Dr. G nodded. “I’ve sent in a blood sample for analysis, but until that gets back, that’s about all I can tell you for sure. The victim was killed,  _then_  thrown in the water.”  
  
Heero peered down at Raymond DeWitt. Sometimes, he hated being right.  
  
“Anything else we need to know here?”  
  
“Not much. Contents of his stomach were unexceptional. Liver and brain normal. His heart was slightly enlarged-- would you like to see?”  
  
Duo grimaced. “No thanks.” He made a motion to leave.  
  
“Thanks for your help, Doctor,” Heero said on the way out.  
  
“Anytime, fellas.”  
  
“Not right in the head, I’m telling you,” Duo muttered in the elevator.   
  
“Something’s not right.”  
  
“I’ll say! Who offers to show you a guy’s  _heart_? A guy who belongs in a castle with an assistant named Igor, that’s who.”  
  
Heero sighed. The elevator dinged their stop and they exited, marching out across the office to slouch into chairs at their desk.   
  
“I mean, about DeWitt.” He pulled out the list of names of Lorenzo’s acquaintances-- and now, possible suspects in DeWitt’s murder-- and looked them over, waiting for the nagging at the back of his mind to coalesce into tangible thought.   
  
Something about the cause of death didn’t look right, stacked up against the list of twenty-something drug dealers and ex-girlfriends who might have cause for revenge. If Raymond had been killed later the same night of the murder, who would have known quickly enough to jump him even before he made it home? Beyond that, there was something else, but he hadn’t quite pinpointed it yet.  
  
Instead, he turned to Duo. “Have we ever done a strangling case?”  
  
“Hm... not that I remember...” Then, he snapped his fingers. “But didn’t Sally and Wufei have that domestic violence case in the summer? The husband killed the wife with a belt or something.”  
  
“That’s it.”  
  
“You want me to go get the file?”  
  
“Maybe, but listen.” He straightened and turned to his partner. “That case had a man attacking a woman. Wasn’t the husband over six feet tall and two hundred pounds?”  
  
Duo nodded. “I remember when they brought him in. He looked like fucking Frankenstein.”  
  
“ _That’s_  what’s strange. You can’t strangle someone to death if you can’t overpower them physically. If he was killed for revenge, the only two with real motive are Lorenzo’s sister and girlfriend, and neither of them could capably pull this off. Maybe there’s a brother or two we don’t know about, but even so, how could they hear about the shooting quickly enough to track him down?”  
  
“You don’t think the murder is connected to the Guadinigno case?”  
  
“Do you?”  
  
Duo leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head.   
  
“It  _is_  kind of weird. You want revenge on a guy, you’d think you’d rough him up a little first, but the guy’s face is pristine. And if they knew Raymond killed Lorenzo, they knew he had a gun. Why would they want to get close enough to strangle him? Why not just shoot him?”  
  
“Right.”  
  
He could see the wheels turning in Duo’s brain. He was gnawing at the method of choice, working it out almost as fast as he could get the words out to bounce off Heero for consideration.   
  
“Strangling is so personal. You gotta get close enough to a guy to put your hands on him, you know? You gotta be totally confident you’re stronger than him. Or you’re just a creep who gets off on the power. But let’s pretend the guy is sane for a second...”  
  
His gaze turned inward for a moment and he went silent.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
But Duo brought himself back and quickly shook his head.   
  
“Nothing. Just reminded me of something, but it’s not important. Anyway, what do we know so far? We’re looking for someone big and mean. I hope to God they’re connected through Lorenzo, but we may be asking for too much there. Where do we start?”  
  
Heero stood up and shrugged on his coat.   
  
“We start,” he said, tossing Duo his jacket, “where Raymond fell in the river.”  
  
* * * *  
  
Trowa watched the woman lift the pen with shaking fingers and lower it to the papers in front of her. With deliberate care, she signed her name, a delicate, looping curl across the bottom of the sheet. Finished, she reached for a tissue from the box at her side and dabbed it at the corners of her eyes. Her face, slim and pretty, had long gone red and mottled from crying.  
  
The tears had come intermittently throughout the day. When they arrived at Winner Enterprises’ downtown headquarters to collect the secretary, she had wept at the news of her boss’s demise with such enthusiasm and stamina that it had made them wonder if, perhaps, there was more to her relationship with the CEO than just professional affection.   
  
At the station, her testimony had been frequently interrupted by bouts of inconsolable bawling, upping their suspicions from ‘maybe fucking the boss’ to ‘probably fucking the boss’. But the story she had managed to tell between sobs was an interesting one.   
  
“He started seeming... stressed out about something a few months ago,” she had said. “I thought it was work-related-- we had just successfully completed a large merger with a competitor-- but then we started receiving threatening phone calls.”  
  
“What kind of threats?”  
  
“They seemed to want money from Fra-- from Mr. Winner. They kept talking about ‘keeping promises’. Then, they called again, and said that if he didn’t listen to them, they’d do something to Quatre.”  
  
“Quatre?”  
  
“Mr. Winner’s son.”  
  
And the heir to the corporate dynasty, most likely.   
  
“Why didn’t you call the police?”  
  
“I... I wasn’t supposed to be listening in on the phone calls. I, um, recorded some of the things they said. I’m sure I still have the notes in my desk at the office. Do you want them?”  
  
“Absolutely.”   
  
“He told me about the threats himself, eventually.”  
  
“When?”  
  
“A few weeks ago. But he told me not to tell anyone about it. He said he’d take care of it himself.”   
  
Took care of it himself, all right, Trowa thought now, sliding the signed statement back in his direction. Took care of it right to the back of the head with a blunt object.  
  
He glanced over the papers for completion, then handed them to Wufei, who sat at the table at his side.  
  
“Thank you, Ms. Mason,” he said.  
  
She dabbed the tissue to her nose and nodded.  
  
They returned to their desks after leading her out of the station.  
  
“So she was worried enough to record the threats, but not enough to call the cops.” Wufei sighed. “Afraid of getting fired, or losing the vacations on the private yacht?”  
  
“Probably a little of both.” Trowa rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. Two hours with the secretary, and the work was just beginning. “What’s next?”  
  
But Wufei was listening to the voicemails incurred during their time talking with Ms. Mason and he put up a hand while he filtered through them. Only when he was finished did he turn to his partner, who had been waiting with impatience while he made sure to delete every single one.  
  
“They just picked up the son from school, he’s on his way.”  
  
“You had to wait until all your messages were cleared to tell me that?”  
  
“Oh, because you’re in a such a hurry.” Wufei rose and stretched. “I’m gonna grab some real coffee up the street. I can’t drink any more of the break room sludge. You want some?”  
  
“I’m fine. I won’t get any sleep tonight if I drink coffee now.”  
  
Wufei snorted. “Wishful thinking,” he said and headed for the door.  
  
He was probably right, but they both knew Wufei was imbibing coffee by the gallon to steady his nerves, not to stay awake. The implications of being named the primary detective on a case this high profile had finally started to sink in sometime around noon, when Commissioner Darlian himself had come downstairs, teetering somewhere between livid and distraught, and wrestled a promise out of the lieutenant and her primary detective that they would find his friend’s killer. Lieutenant Une had spent the next several hours locked in her office, fielding calls from the press. After a week of this, Trowa imagined her temper would be nuclear. And at the center of the pressure cooker stood he and his partner.  
  
The phone at his desk rang, pulling him out of his rather neurotic thoughts, and he reached for it gratefully.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Detective Barton, we’ve got Frank Winner’s son down here. Would you like to come take him upstairs?”  
  
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Trowa said, already out of his seat.  
  
He found the police who had called him standing at the front desk, and sandwiched between them, the son of the late Winner patriarch.  
  
They had collected him at school and he still wore the grey tweed uniform jacket, black tailored pants cut impeccably over expensive shoes. Slung over one shoulder was a monogrammed school bag that itself appeared to cost more than Trowa’s entire wardrobe.  
  
The first thing Trowa thought was: he doesn’t look a thing like his father. Frank Winner was a tall man, with a surprisingly athletic build for his age and dark brown hair. His son, in contrast, was a short, slim boy with a shock of hay-blonde hair that fell into wide eyes of pastel green. Where his father had sported a strong, defined jaw, his son had a round, youthful face and pale, pink skin. It made Trowa wonder what his mother looked like.   
  
“Quatre Winner?”  
  
He stuck out a hand and the boy stepped forward, away from the police at his side, and took it. His soft, slim hands were still cold from the winter air outside.  
  
He introduced himself. “Trowa Barton.”  
  
Quatre smiled, and Trowa noticed for the first time that he must have been crying on the way over. Two bright spots of red glowed on his cheeks. The delicate blonde lashes that framed his eyes still appeared damp.   
  
“Pleased to meet you,” he said.  
  
Trowa found himself giving Quatre a smile in return. He nodded to the police, then put a hand on Quatre’s back.  
  
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said, and led him to the elevator.  
  
He took the boy to the interview room where his father’s secretary had earlier sat, where the box of tissues still remained, just in case. He indicated for Quatre to sit, then retrieved his notepad from his desk and joined him in the room.  
  
“Okay, Quatre,” he said.   
  
The boy turned big, shining eyes to him. He didn’t look a thing like his father. It was astounding.  
  
Trowa cleared his throat. “Is it okay to begin?”  
  
Quatre gave a small sigh. “Yeah.”  
  
They breezed through the biographical questions. Quatre Winner was seventeen years old and a senior at Lagrange Academy, living with his father at 66 Hawthorne Park West. His mother, Katherine Winner, had died when he was an infant.  
  
“I have a sister named Catherine,” Trowa said, wondering if Katherine Winner had had the same striking blond hair and enormous green eyes. “It’s a pretty name.”  
  
“I think so, too,” Quatre said, and smiled.  
  
“Do you remember anything out of the ordinary happening in the last few months? Did your father act strange or stressed?”  
  
Quatre laughed in a brief, sad way. “Oh, he’s always stressed. There was this huge merger at the company a few months ago and I barely ever saw him. He sleeps in his office a lot.”  
  
“Did it bother you?”  
  
“It’s always been like that. I got used to it.”  
  
“So there was no change in demeanor?” Trowa continued. Where had Mr. Winner’s priorities lain, that his secretary saw him enough to notice a change and his son didn’t?  
  
“Actually, something did happen a couple of weeks ago.”   
  
“What was it?”  
  
“My father came home early from work-- I think it was a Monday-- which is pretty unusual by itself. He was really upset. He sat down with me and told me that I needed to be careful, because apparently someone had been calling him up and threatening me. I didn’t really understand what he meant, and he wouldn’t say anything else. He just said he would take care of it.”  
  
It sounded like the secretary’s story. Mr. Winner, it seemed, had a habit of keeping people in the dark.  
  
“What did you think when he told you that?”  
  
“I wasn’t really sure  _what_  to think,” Quatre sighed. “Nothing like that had ever happened before. And now...”  
  
His eyes went to the wall. He brought up a hand to hastily wipe a tear away before it could roll down his cheek.  
  
“I... I’m scared he did something stupid trying to protect me.”  
  
“Like what?”   
  
“I... don’t know. I don’t know.” Quatre shook his head at the wall. “He never told me anything. He wanted me to take over one day, you know, run the family enterprise. We... used to fight about it a lot.”  
  
“You did?”  
  
Quatre nodded and turned his way. Those bright green eyes swam, red around the edges.  
  
“Did your father ever ask something like that from you?” he asked suddenly, then corrected himself. “No, not ask. Told you?”  
  
Trowa blinked for a second. Was he really asking him? The boy’s gaze was intent, despite the tears threatening to spill over.   
  
He offered a shrug.  
  
“My dad was a mechanic. He just wanted me to stay out of jail.”  
  
“What did he think of you becoming a cop?”  
  
“He didn’t get a chance to tell me how he felt, actually. He died when I was in high school.”  
  
Quatre’s brows knit together. “I’m sorry,” he said, genuinely, and Trowa felt a strange twist in his chest. The poor kid just lost his father himself. What was he saying sorry to  _him_  for?  
  
There was a knock on the door and Wufei’s stern face peeked into the room.  
  
“Barton. A minute?”  
  
“Excuse me,” Trowa said to Quatre, and met his partner in the hallway.  
  
“Thanks for letting me know the Winner kid arrived,” he said flatly.  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“So?” Wufei pressed, and raised his eyebrows. “What’s his alibi?”  
  
Trowa stared. He hadn’t even thought to ask. There hadn’t even been a moment where he thought Quatre might not have been where he ought to be.   
  
“He was at school,” he offered.   
  
“I’ll have someone check it out. You’ve got this taken care of for now?”   
  
Wufei motioned at the interview room, and Trowa nodded, though he was now feeling less than sure.  
  
“Good. I’ll be back in a minute.”   
  
Wufei went off to validate Quatre Winner’s alibi. It was the first thing Trowa should have done. What was wrong with him? The biggest case in years, handed to them on a silver platter, and he wasn’t even paying attention to the interview with, he realized with sudden clarity, a possible suspect.   
  
Annoyed with himself, he stepped back into the room to see Quatre hastily rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. At his entrance, the boy returned his hands to his lap and offered him a bleak smile.   
  
“It’s okay to cry in front of me, you know.”  
  
“I know,” the boy replied, “but I’m trying not to anyway.”  
  
“I can give you a few minutes before we continue, if you want.”  
  
“No, it’s fine... I want to continue.”  
  
Trowa leafed through his notes, trying to regain his train of thought. Quatre hastily wiped at the corner of one eye when he thought Trowa wasn’t looking. But he didn’t miss the gesture, or the moment of pain that spread across the boy’s pale face before it was reigned in again.   
  
Finish the interview, he chided himself.  
  
“Quatre, do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt your father?” he said, as gently as he could.  
  
Quatre sighed and shook his head. “No. I didn’t really know the people he worked with. I didn’t  _want_  to know. He tried to bring me to functions all the time and I would just start another fight.”   
  
Quatre looked away, losing the fight for composure. Tears began to slip past those long lashes, too wet themselves to protest.   
  
“I know he loved me. We never agreed on anything, but I know he did. All I want to do is help, but... but I can’t even do that for him...”   
  
Again, something twisted inside Trowa, a strange, disconcerting feeling.  
  
“Quatre, you’re helping us a lot,” he insisted, but it didn’t seem to do anything. The tears were silent, but unyielding. He watched them fall, and put down his pad and pen. He wouldn’t continue the interview while he was like this.   
  
He remembered, suddenly, watching the ambulance pull away from his house, his sister crying in his arms, and knowing without a doubt that his father was dead. Something in the way he had failed to wake up after Trowa had shaken him, lying there in his ratty easy chair in the living room, bottle still open, nearly empty in his lap. Something in the way he had stayed unconscious even after Trowa had lost his temper and hit him as hard as he could across the face, for all the things he had done to their mother, for the way his sister had crumpled, sobbing, against the door when he still wouldn’t wake.   
  
He had been told not to drink, that his liver couldn’t handle it anymore after forty years, that he was taking his own life into his hands every time he poured himself another stiff one, but it didn’t matter, his children, his wife, none of it had mattered to him, nothing mattered as much as the oblivion the alcohol provided. Trowa had stood there, arms around his inconsolable sister, and watched the ambulance pull out of their potholed street, and it had seemed inevitable that he would have ended up there someday, with his father in a stretcher, hooked up to a thousand IV drips in a vain attempt to revive him.   
  
He hadn’t cried-- not even at the funeral, no matter how much his mother and sister had. Nothing like how Quatre was crying for his father now. It hadn’t seemed necessary. He had done it to himself.   
  
But watching Quatre now, he thought for the first time that maybe he should have.  
  
A knock on the door jarred him out of the memory, and he stood. Wufei was there, beckoning him out into the hallway.  
  
“Well, the alibi checks out,” Wufei said, flashing a sheet of paper for Trowa to see. “Kid’s been to all his classes today, right on time.”  
  
So, he had had no reason to doubt himself at all. Quatre was just as much a victim as his father. Now, he could focus entirely on helping him, rather than wasting time with suspicions he had really never had to begin with.  
  
“Has he said anything worthwhile?”  
  
Trowa shrugged.  
  
“No. Frank Winner seems to have kept him in the dark about a lot of his life. He knew about the threats, at least. He told him right before he died.”  
  
Wufei looked disappointed. “That’s it?”  
  
“The secretary probably knows more than the guy’s own son.”  
  
“All right, well, let’s go in and finish the interview, and let the kid go.”  
  
They stepped back into the room and Wufei held out his hand for Quatre to shake.  
  
“Morning, Quatre. I’m Wufei Chang, lead prosecutor on this case.” Trowa had the feeling he’d be hearing Wufei introduce himself as such for many more weeks to come.  
  
Quatre offered Wufei a bleak smile and shook his hand. They sat down, Wufei picking Trowa’s notes up from the table and scanning them briefly.   
  
“Well, Mr. Winner, it seems like my partner has just about asked everything we needed to know from you. Let’s see... any close relatives? Brothers or sisters?”  
  
“I... um, I have five sisters.”   
  
Wufei’s eyes momentarily widened.   
  
“We’d like their contact information, if that’s all right. Do any of them live nearby?”  
  
Quatre shook his head.   
  
“Everyone but Aria lives abroad, and she’s on the other side of the country.” His eyes flickered to Trowa and he continued. “They... don’t really get along with my father either.”  
  
Wufei scribbled the information hastily down on Trowa’s pad.  
  
“Anyone you can stay with tonight?”  
  
Something troubling passed over Quatre’s expression. Perhaps it was the realization that no, he would not be able to go home today. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever again.   
  
“No,” he said finally.   
  
Trowa had lost his father, but he had still had his mother and his sister. Who did Quatre have?  
  
“We have a hotel that we set people up with who need protection. We can get the paperwork together and have you stay there, but you’ll have to stay at the station until it’s ready. It may take a few hours.”  
  
A thought crossed Trowa’s mind, a strange idea that, once implanted, refused to shake itself.  
  
Wufei continued. “We’re going to take these threats made against your life very seriously, in light of what’s happened. We’ll arrange a police escort to take you to school and pick you up. Don’t worry about your safety, that’s what we’re here for.”  
  
Quatre nodded his head numbly. The idea in Trowa’s head took more substantial shape, becoming a plan of action. An urge, spurred to life by the strange twist in his gut, the memories stirred up from the bottom of his mind, that became determination.   
  
He stood up.  
  
“Detective Chang, can I talk to you outside a minute?”  
  
Wufei gave him a strange look, probably because Trowa had never thought to refer to him so politely before. All the same, he followed him out to the hall.  
  
“Well?”  
  
“Let the Winner kid stay at my place tonight.”  
  
Wufei stared at him like he’d grown a second head.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I’m serious.”  
  
“I can tell. I’m just wondering if you’ve decided to start drinking early today.”  
  
“Very funny.”  
  
“No, really, Trowa, why are you asking for this?”  
  
“It’s...” He quickly decided that he wouldn’t tell his partner exactly how watching Quatre cry had made him feel. Instead, he said, “I lost my father at the same age. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be all alone after that happened. I... don’t think he should be alone tonight, that’s all.” He shrugged in a brazen attempt at nonchalance.  
  
Wufei regarded him for a moment, then thoughtfully cocked his head.  
  
“You mean, you think he might attempt suicide?”  
  
That hadn’t been what Trowa had meant at all, but he saw a sudden opportunity and took it.  
  
“He was pretty shaken up before you got here.”  
  
He could see the wheels turning in Wufei’s head, mulling it over. He was almost there.  
  
“In Narcotics, we always sent witnesses to the Best Western off of Wilcox. That’s right near my house. I could keep an eye on him once he ends up there. Tonight, though... speaking from experience, he’s liable to do just about anything.”  
  
Wufei’s brows shot up, the implication in Trowa’s lie clear. If Trowa Barton, Narcotics’ unwavering boy wonder, had had such a dark moment after the death of his father that he had considered ending his own life, a delicate kid like the Winner son hardly stood a chance. In that case, it was hardly inappropriate to let the boy stay with a police for the night. In fact, it was downright noble.  
  
After a minute of contemplation, Wufei nodded.  
  
“I think that may be a good idea,” he said, and Trowa had to work to keep the odd surge of excitement he felt at bay. It felt... wrong to feel this good about it. He was just doing the kid a favor, right? It wasn’t really anything.  
  
It was harmless.  
  
“I suppose I should be the one to talk to Noin about this,” Wufei mused. “Well, let’s go break the news to the kid, and get this show on the road.”  
  
Trowa forced the strange track his thoughts were taking out of mind, and followed his partner back into the interview room, buzzing with a feeling he couldn’t quite put words to.   
  
* * * *  
  
Duo found the place a mile upstream from where Raymond Dewitt had been found.  
  
“Here. Pull over, Heero.”  
  
They rolled to a stop on the graveled path. Duo pointed out the window to the river below, and Heero had to learn far over in his seat to be able to see.  
  
“Right there. Big hole in the ice. That’s gotta be where the guy threw him in.”  
  
“Or girl.”  
  
Duo threw him an incredulous look. “You really think a chick heaved that body into the river?”  
  
Heero shrugged. “You never know.” But he offered his partner a smirk, and Duo’s look softened to a grin.  
  
“Asshole. Come on, let’s go do some police work.”  
  
They exited the car and stalked carefully down the bank to the river. A jagged hole lay open in the thick ice near the shore. It was certainly large enough for a body to drop into.   
  
“What if the gun’s here, huh? Wouldn’t that be great?”  
  
“Yeah, and then we’ll get million-dollar raises and free trips to Disney World.” Heero shook his head.  
  
“If there’s one thing I love about you, Yuy, it’s your boundless optimism.”  
  
The area around the hole was a mess of overgrown reeds and branches, and they were soon hunched over and peering into the tangled growth, looking for a clue as to why Raymond DeWitt might have ended up here. A weapon used to break the ice, then tossed. A torn scrap of fabric from the perp’s clothing. A signed and notarized confession, while he was at it.  
  
Two days was more than enough time for a crime scene to be ruined by weather or passers-by. Wind could blow scraps of evidence away. A car could turn footprints to mud. Hell, they were lucky the river hadn’t frozen the hole up again.   
  
A few feet ahead of him, Duo stood up from where he had been bent over, peering at the icy mud at the river’s edge, one hand rubbing his lower back gently as he ran his eyes over the area.   
  
“Hey Heero, there’s a trash can up there by the road,” he said, gesturing back up the bank. “I’m going to go check it out.”  
  
Heero nodded and went back to examining the bushes. He thought he saw something gleam beneath the thickly huddled branches, and he got to work snapping them and tossing them away, trying to see what might be underneath. He could hear Duo climbing the embankment, then the faraway crunch of gravel under his shoes as he reached the path again, and the clank of a trash can’s tin lid being dropped to the ground. Heero reached his hand into the meager space between the bush’s branches he had made for himself, pawing blindly for the object underneath. It was probably nothing, a soda can, and he was ruining his only nice pair of gloves for nothing. Then his fingers closed around it and he realized exactly what it was.  
  
Suddenly on overdrive, he pulled his hand quickly out of the depths of the bush, not caring anymore whether he scratched up his gloves.   
  
Clutched in his grip was the barrel of a gun.  
  
“Duo!” He shouted, a smile spreading wildly across his face. “You’re not going to believe what I just found!”  
  
Maybe they still had a little luck with them, after all.  
  
Duo hurried over to the close side of the embankment, waving his arms.   
  
“Heero! You need to get over here!”  
  
Heero held the gun in the air triumphantly so Duo could see. To his surprise, Duo acted as if he didn’t even notice.  
  
“Yuy, get the fuck over here right now!”  
  
What the hell? Gun in hand, Heero trotted up the bank, joining Duo at the top.  
  
“I found the gun,” he said. Duo’s face was ashen.   
  
“I found something, too.”  
  
“What?”  
  
But Duo only shook his head and turned toward the trash can. Heero followed him, and when Duo stopped and pointed in, he took a look and immediately his burgeoning good mood at recovering their last homicide’s murder weapon vanished entirely.  
  
Stuffed haphazardly into a black trash bag, discarded into the garbage can at the side of the road where Raymond DeWitt was dumped, was the body of a child. 


	3. Chapter 3

Heero rubbed at his temples and gave his computer’s clock a morose glance. Eleven PM. He was supposed to have left work five hours ago.  
  
That, of course, was before they had found the child’s body in the trash can.  
  
Heero took another look at the paper he held in his hands, that he had been waiting with Duo at their desk to receive. Dr. G’s fluid handwriting sprawled across the page, detailing the examination’s finding with clinical objectivity. Cause of death, asphyxiation. The decomposition of the body placed the time of death at around the same time as DeWitt’s. Indeed, their victims’ demises seemed to have a lot in common.  
  
They hadn’t said it out loud yet, but neither of them were kidding themselves that the murders weren’t somehow related. But beyond that, there were only questions, and no answers.   
  
Duo had begun typing up the case file as soon as they had returned to headquarters, and had said nearly nothing to his partner in the hours since. He was rigid and grimly focused, staring hard at his computer screen as if it was responsible for the disturbing details he was typing into its database. With Duo so alarmingly quiet, it was dead silent between them. It had not gone unnoticed by the other detectives in Homicide, but news of the discovery at the river had travelled, and no one approached to rib Duo on his uncharacteristic lack of chatter. When Heero’s eyes occasionally caught those of another detective, he would receive a nod of sympathy. They understood the kind of shit that had been dropped into his and Duo’s laps.   
  
Heero glanced at the medical exam report again. Male, aged approximately eleven years. Weight, seventy pounds. That was the extent of the victim’s identification. He was clothed in filthy, threadbare pants and a sweater not nearly warm enough for the bitter winter weather. The clothes and the weight suggested the boy had either been living on the street or in a neglectful home. Both were equally likely in the Drain. Drug-addict parents could easily forget to clothe or bathe or feed a kid. And if he had been homeless, he had been lucky to scrounge up even a sweater to wear.  
  
Heero hoped for their sakes that the kid had an address they could locate. He cocked a cynical smile at the thought. Christ, only a detective could wish that a little boy had a pair of abusive parents to track down, rather than none at all. If the kid was truly homeless, they had a long and most likely unfruitful slog through the missing children database ahead of them. And if, hope against hope, they managed to find the kid’s name, they were still left with almost no information to go on.   
  
And what the hell did the little boy have to do with Raymond, anyway? There was a giant hole in the story that started with Lorenzo’s shooting, and ended inexplicably with a child in a trash can. And what had gotten into Duo?  
  
Heero ran a hand over his face. He never thought he’d be envying Trowa and Wufei for the media shit-storm murder they’d acquired, but at least there was notoriety there, there was money, there was motive. There was nothing here. A body in the river and a body in the garbage, and not a goddamn clue. He needed a drink.  
  
The typing slowed at his side, and Duo turned to his partner, gave him a quick once-over. Mercifully, he spoke, the first time in hours.  
  
“You look like shit.”  
  
Exhausted, Heero barked a laugh. “Thanks.”  
  
“Let’s hit Howard’s?” Duo said, but the tone was more of a demand than an offer. Heero briefly wondered if he had voiced that need for a drink out loud. No, he was tired, but not that tired. Duo just knew him well enough to read it in his expression.  
  
Besides, Duo damn well looked like he needed a drink himself.  
  
They left their files open on their desk. No point in putting any of them away, really; they’d be back in a few hours, pouring over the documents anew. Better to save a little time and have them ready to go when they staggered into headquarters again.  
  
Duo didn’t speak, didn’t even crack a smile the entire way to Howard’s. It was only halfway through their first beers, perched on stools at the far end of the bar, sequestered from the rest of the patrons, that Duo glanced his way.  
  
“What do you think?” Duo began.   
  
“I don’t know what the hell to think, Duo.” He sighed. “I don’t know what the kid and DeWitt have in common.”  
  
“Well, I have no fucking clue what Raymond has to do with any of it.” Duo took a hard swig of his beer.   
  
Heero followed suit. “Me either. Maybe nothing.”  
  
“Bullshit. Whoever killed DeWitt killed that little boy.” Duo’s fingers tightened around his bottle.  
  
“I know. Maybe he saw the kid get murdered.”  
  
“Yeah, maybe.”   
  
It was a few minutes until Duo spoke again.  
  
“I’m going to ask Noin not to assign any other detectives on this one. I want to be the primary.”  
  
Heero nodded, but he watched Duo out of the corner of his eye with a wary glance. His partner’s face was drawn, staring hard at his hands around his almost-empty beer bottle. There was something he wasn’t telling him.   
  
“That little kid, Heero, he didn’t deserve that shit,” Duo continued, voice quiet, tinged with simmering anger. “Raymond shot another person in cold blood, so you can think what you want about him. But that little boy didn’t deserve it.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Duo glanced at him, then away. “Yeah.”  
  
They finished their drinks in silence and left the bar, heading home in opposite directions. Heero showered and climbed into bed, hoping for a few hours of real sleep before heading back to work again in the morning, but it was a long time until he could get the anger in Duo’s voice out of his mind.  
  
* * * *  
  
Trowa turned the key to his apartment and held the door to let his guest inside.  
  
“Thanks,” Quatre said quietly, slipping past him into the darkened room. Trowa shut the door behind them and flipped the switch on the wall, illuminating a small living room occupied mostly with a threadbare couch and accompanying television.  
  
“It’s no Hawthorne Park,” he said apologetically. “But it’ll have to do for tonight.”  
  
Quatre, taking stock of the surroundings, turned and gave him a genuine smile.   
  
“It’s a nice place,” he said sincerely. He began to remove his coat, and Trowa took it from him gently and put it in the closet by the door, followed by a pair of expensive dress shoes.  
  
“Do you want to take a shower?”   
  
“Oh, yes, thank you.”  
  
So Trowa led him to the linen closet and pulled out a couple of fresh towels, the kind that went two for one on sale. If Quatre noticed the quality, he didn’t seem to mind.   
  
“Bathroom’s down the hall. Guest room is the one before it on the left. I’ll find you something to sleep in.”  
  
That same smile beamed across the boy’s face again. “Thank you.”  
  
Trowa waited until Quatre had closed the bathroom door behind him before collapsing heavily onto the couch, not even bothering to remove his coat and shoes. He ran both hands up over his face, through his hair, and sighed.  
  
What exactly was he doing with the son of his murder victim in his apartment? Whether or not the circumstances warranted it was beside the point, and he damn well knew it. He was getting himself involved in a dangerous way. And there was no way Noin would have allowed this if she knew where his proclivities lay.   
  
Even so, Trowa forced himself up off the couch and made his way to his bedroom. He searched through his drawers for something that might fit Quatre, and settled on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that were too small for him anymore. He cracked a smile looking at the clothes in his hands. The t-shirt was so faded it was hard to tell what color it might once have been, and the pants ran ragged at the bottom. He might have worn these in high school himself.   
  
He folded them and laid them out on the guest bed, then headed to the kitchen, where he pulled a beer from the fridge and drank it standing, leaning against the wall in the dark. He really could have used something stronger, but that was a bad idea and he knew it. Instead, he made his way back out to the couch, pulling off his coat at last and draping it haphazardly over the back. He loosened his tie and discarded that somewhere, too. The beer warmed him pleasantly and he allowed his eyes to slide closed and his head to fall back against the cushions.  
  
He awoke to the soft sound of someone else’s footsteps in his apartment, and he glanced over to find Quatre standing by the couch, wearing the clothes Trowa had set out for him. They were slightly big, the neck and arms of the shirt loosened with use, and Trowa’s eyes flickered automatically over the exposed pale dip of his collarbone, the delicate skin of his neck, before he could catch himself.  
  
“Sorry,” Quatre said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”  
  
“It’s fine.” He shifted on the couch and Quatre sat down at one end, drawing his legs up under his knees.  
  
“I wanted to thank you for everything, Officer Barton. You really didn’t have to do all of this for me.”  
  
I know I didn’t, Trowa thought sharply, and flinched.   
  
“I’m not an officer,” he blurted.  
  
“Oh. What should I call you, then?”  
  
Trowa spoke before his mind could catch up.  
  
“You can call me Trowa.”  
  
Quatre flashed him a bright smile, green eyes wide. “All right.”  
  
You’re an idiot, his mind supplied.  
  
He cleared his throat. “Would you like anything? Water? Tea? Beer?”  
  
Quatre raised an eyebrow. “Beer?”  
  
Trowa shrugged and earned a laugh in return.  
  
“Tea is fine. Thank you... Trowa.”  
  
A goddamn idiot.  
  
Trowa leapt off the couch to the kitchen, fumbling through seldom-opened cabinets to find a tea cup. He found two, one sporting a rather large chip at the top, the other a gag gift Duo had given him when he transferred into homicide. It read:  _Coffee, Chocolate, Men: Some things are better rich!_  There was no way in hell he was going to give that one to Quatre. He jammed it back into the cabinet, lodging it in a far corner.   
  
He located the tea bags, their box unopened and slightly dusty, in the pantry. It was only then that he realized he didn’t have a kettle. Shit. He poured water into the chipped mug and let it cook in the microwave a while instead.  
  
He returned to the living room and handed Quatre the tea, who took it with both hands.  
  
“Sorry, it’s probably not hot enough.”  
  
Quatre gave it an experimental sip as Trowa sat back down at the other end of the couch.  
  
“No, it’s perfect. Thank you, Trowa.”  
  
There was a few minutes of silence as Quatre drank. Trowa found himself watching him, glance cast sideways. There were dark shadows under Quatre’s eyes that belied how tired he was. The hands gripping the chipped mug were trembling slightly, though whether with fatigue or emotional exhaustion, Trowa couldn’t tell.  
  
When he finished, Quatre set the mug down on the coffee table.  
  
“Will the hotel... be near here?”  
  
“It’s not too far. Walking distance.”  
  
Quatre’s response was a sweet little smile. It made Trowa clear his throat in distraction.  
  
“How come?”   
  
The question seemed to bother Quatre. He looked almost guilty.  
  
“I’m sorry. It’s just that... you’ve helped me so much already. I was hoping you would still be nearby. I don’t have anyone else to turn to, really, but now that I’m saying it out loud I realize how much of a burden I’d be putting on you to--”  
  
“Stop,” Trowa said softly.   
  
His hand came to rest on Quatre’s shoulder of its own volition. Quatre’s eyes flickered there, then up to his face.   
  
“It’s not a burden. I’ll be there whenever you need me, Quatre.”   
  
He wondered exactly what he meant by that.  
  
Trowa’s words seemed to exhaust whatever reserves of composure Quatre had maintained since the interview at the station. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes, spilling over down his pale cheeks. He brought his hands to his face and began to softly cry.  
  
And Trowa found himself reaching for him, leaning across the couch to bring his arms around those quietly trembling shoulders. Quatre fell against him, head pillowing beneath his chin, and for a long time, Trowa held him, whispering softly that it would be okay, it would be all right, words he had once whispered into the auburn curls of his sister's hair, the glare of ambulance lights washing them red and white, red and white. It would be okay, somehow. He would make it okay. He promised. It would be all right.  
  
But whether it ever could be all right for the boy again was not something he could hope to know.  
  
* * * *  
  
Duo leaned heavily against Heero, his deep voice slightly slurred, well on his way to drunk already.   
  
“Give me back my beer, Yuy.”   
  
He reached a broad arm out, but Heero evaded his grasp and was rewarded with a icy glare from his partner.  
  
“You’re an asshole.”  
  
“And you almost threw this at your commanding officer. I’m confiscating it.”   
  
“She called me belligerent.”  
  
“You  _are_  belligerent.”  
  
Duo threw up his arms, pushing fast away from Heero like he’d been burned by the contact.   
  
“Fine, fine. I see whose side you’re on, traitor.”   
  
He stood woozily up from the table and headed in the direction of the bathroom. Heero watched him go with a frustrated sigh. This was the third night in a row he’d come with Duo to Howard’s since they’d found the boy, the third night in a row that Duo seemed intent on getting blackout drunk as fast as possible, the third night in a row that he’d been acting hostile towards his friends and his partner. The other detectives were joining them tonight, but Duo was nowhere near his usual level of enthusiasm. It was a dark day indeed when Heero was the talkative one of the two. But, he supposed, it was hard to chat when you were busy downing drinks with the zeal Duo was. If he didn’t come back from the bathroom in ten minutes, Heero was probably going to have to carry him out.  
  
Noin looked up from her conversation with Wufei and caught his eye.  
  
“Yuy, a moment.”  
  
He nodded and followed her as she searched out a more secluded area of the bar, a dark corner behind the billiards. She glanced back at their table to make sure no one was watching them too closely, but Trowa and Wufei appeared to be arguing about the game on the overhead televisions and paid them no attention. Satisfied, Noin turned to him.  
  
“Duo’s been tense lately,” she said.  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Any idea why?”  
  
Heero shrugged one shoulder. “He hasn’t told me anything.”  
  
“I see.” Noin straightened. “Look, I didn’t want to bring this up at headquarters because things have a way of getting around there. It’s the case you pulled, with the boy, I know that much. You know Duo asked to be primary, right?”  
  
He nodded.  
  
“No one else is exactly chomping at the bit to take on this one, so I had no problem telling him it was all right. But I have a favor to ask you.”  
  
She dropped her voice, as if concerned about being overheard even in the general cacophony of the bar.  
  
“I want you to watch him, Heero. The way he’s been acting the last few days has me worried. I’m not saying we’ll have a... situation on our hands like last time, but I want you to make sure it doesn’t get that far. All right?”  
  
He had been thinking about it too the last few days. Duo had been a model detective for the last couple of years, but maybe that had only been because Noin and Une had been watching out for him, assigning them cases that wouldn’t bring out that other side of him. They couldn’t afford him getting violent again. And if he got personally invested in this case, well...  
  
He wouldn’t. Heero wouldn’t let it happen.  
  
“All right,” he told his sergeant.   
  
“If you find the asshole who did it, you make sure he makes it to the station alive, all right?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Noin patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Yuy. Come on.”  
  
She steered them back to the table. Trowa and Wufei were still deep in conversation, one escalating quickly into argument.  
  
“Martinez is unbelievably overrated,” Wufei was saying, gesturing animatedly at the screen. “I can’t believe you prefer him to Polk.”  
  
“You’re telling me a future hall-of-famer is  _overrated_? You’re living on a goddamn different planet.”  
  
Heero and Noin took their seats, Noin rolling her eyes in exasperation. “I don’t understand this obsession you guys have with sports. Who is this Martinez you’re so in love with, Barton?”  
  
“The pitcher for the Mutts.”  
  
“Who, the one in the blue?”  
  
Wufei and Trowa stared at her.   
  
“The Mutts are in red,” Wufei said flatly, eyes wide like he couldn’t believe he had to say it out loud.  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“You don’t know the colors of your city’s  _team_?” Trowa cut in, equally shocked.  
  
She shrugged.   
  
“To be honest, boys, I couldn’t care less about baseball.”  
  
Wufei snorted. “It’s times like this I’m reminded you’re a woman, Sergeant.”  
  
That earned him a smack on the back of the head. At that moment, Duo returned from the bathroom, swiping his beer back from Heero’s side of the table with a glare before sitting back down.  
  
Wufei and Trowa turned immediately to him, apparently having waited for his arrival.   
  
“Duo, settle an argument for us, please,” Trowa said.  
  
“Uh, sure.”  
  
“Who’s the better pitcher, Martinez or Polk?”  
  
“Is that really a question? Please.” When Duo saw that the two detectives were waiting on his answer, he elaborated. “Martinez, obviously.”  
  
Trowa grinned at his partner, vindicated. “Obviously!”  
  
“Wait, Wufei likes  _Polk_? You been getting into the evidence in Narcotics or something, man?”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
There was a small electronic twittering and Trowa pulled his phone from his pocket and flipped it open. He smiled at whatever message he’d received, then put it away.   
  
Duo did not miss the gesture.  
  
“Hey, Barton, who was that?”  
  
Trowa’s face was the picture of nonchalance. “Nobody.”  
  
“Hey, you get that kid a hotel room yet? The billionaire’s son.”  
  
“Quatre,” Trowa corrected.  
  
Duo shrugged. “Yeah, fine.”   
  
“We’ve got him over in the Best Western on Wilcox,” Wufei broke in.  
  
Duo broke out in a laugh.   
  
“Best Western, huh? Bet he doesn’t last a week before he’s demanding an upgrade to the Ritz.”  
  
Trowa’s eyebrow twitched. Heero watched the momentary shift in expression, then the evening out of Trowa’s features as he caught himself. He brought his beer to his lips and shrugged behind the glass.  
  
“If he does, it’s coming out of Wufei’s overtime pay.”  
  
“Like hell it is!”  
  
“You  _are_  the primary detective,” Noin added.  
  
“Sergeant, please, don’t encourage him.”  
  
“She has a point,” Heero said.  
  
Wufei levelled a blank glare at him. “Not you too.”  
  
“Man, Wu, think you could hook me up with a suite downtown sometime?” Duo cut in, a smile finally spreading across his face.  
  
“There will be  _no_  hotel rooms at the Ritz, and  _definitely_  not on my dime!”  
  
Noin laughed and clinked her mug against his. “Cheers to that, detective. Now, drink up boys, next round’s on me!”  
  
* * * *  
  
“Come on, Duo, we’re here.”  
  
“Hmmph.”  
  
“Duo, wake up.”  
  
Duo rolled over in the passenger’s seat. Heero put his car in park and shook his partner’s shoulder.  
  
“Get up.”  
  
Duo peered over his shoulder with a baleful grimace.  
  
“Can’t,” he muttered. “Everything's spinning.”  
  
Heero let out a long sigh of frustration. Killing the motor, he got out and walked around to the passenger’s side of his car. Duo nearly tumbled out when he opened the door, and Heero grabbed him by the jacket before he fell. Duo’s head rolled against Heero’s arm, eyes fluttering closed again, seemingly unaware of how close he had come to smacking face-first into the icy street.  
  
“Come on, Duo. Let’s get you upstairs.”  
  
This time, Duo gave him a brief, pained nod.  
  
“All right.”  
  
Together, they got him out of the car, Heero hauling him upright before he stumbled backward and wound up on the ground. When Duo began to turn in the opposite direction of his apartment building, Heero grabbed him by the arm and steered him back the right way. They slowly weaved across the street.   
  
“Why did you have to get so fucking drunk,” Heero muttered.   
  
“Sorry, buddy,” Duo replied, his face falling.   
  
Damn, he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.  
  
Heero guided Duo up the stairs to his floor. He led him to his apartment, Duo grumbling and leaning heavily against him, and when they got to the door, he pitched against it, using it for support as he dug his keys out of his pocket. It took him a couple of tries to find the right one. Just as Heero was beginning to wonder if he would have to do it himself, Duo managed to slide the correct key in the door and it swung open, revealing the darkened room inside.   
  
With a triumphant grin, Duo turned to his partner.  
  
“Thanks, Yuy.”  
  
Duo was close and his voice was quiet. He was warm with alcohol, his smile and his gaze unfocused. Whatever remark Heero had been preparing to say was forgotten and he simply nodded, pushing Duo inside his apartment with more force than was necessary.  
  
“Get some sleep.”  
  
He pulled the door shut behind Duo without waiting for an answer. Flustered, he hurried out of the building to his car, jogging quickly in the bitter midnight cold. The turn of the engine brought with it a flood of heated air from the vents and he sat for a moment and let the car soak up the warmth. A minute passed and his eyes shifted automatically, seeking out apartment 212.  
  
The light was still out.   
  
Heero had an image in his mind of Duo, unconscious on the floor of his living room, still in his jacket and shoes, too wasted to make it back to his bed. Shit. He didn’t have to rush out of there like he was on fire. He should have helped him.  
  
It didn’t matter, he told himself. Duo was a grown man, he didn’t need to be coddled like an infant. If he wanted to jump headfirst down a liquor bottle, well, that was his prerogative.   
  
It wasn’t his fault that Heero thought about him too damn much.  
  
No, Heero thought morosely, turning away down the street, it wasn’t his fault at all.


	4. Chapter 4

The far-off ding of an arriving elevator made Heero look up from his computer. Sure enough, Duo walked out, test results in one hand, and made his way over to their desk, albeit slowly and with his other hand clutching onto a cup of coffee like it held the world’s only antidote to his massive hangover. He sat heavily down and took a long, heavy sip before flashing the manila folder at Heero.  
  
“Well,” he began, “do you want the good news or the bad news first?”  
  
Heero shrugged.  
  
“All right, good news it is. That gun you found by the river matches the bullets recovered from Lorenzo’s body. As far as I’m concerned, that case is clear, and I’m sure Une will agree with me.”  
  
“That’s great.” They were beginning to amass quite a collection of red names on The Board. It was a relief to be able to close Lorenzo’s file.   
  
But he remained wary. “What’s the bad news?”   
  
Duo put down the test results for the gun and pulled another typed sheet out of the folder.  
  
“I stopped by the morgue to see if the toxicology report on the kid had come back. Take a look.”   
  
He handed the paper over. Heero skimmed the information, mostly proprietary, nothing particularly interesting--  
  
“--Chloroform?”  
  
Duo took another long drag of his coffee. “G said it isn’t even hard to make. Chlorine and ethanol. You can buy shit like that online nowadays.”  
  
“So, he was trying to kidnap him.”  
  
“Right. Think Raymond DeWitt saw it go down?”  
  
Heero shrugged. “Maybe.”  
  
“To be honest, I don’t care that much about how Raymond met his end. He shot another guy in cold blood. In fact, leading us inadvertently to the kid’s body is probably the only decent thing he ever did in his life.”  
  
Heero snorted. “You’re not usually this morbid.”  
  
“Yeah, I gotta watch out. People are going to say you’re rubbing off on me.”   
  
“Shut up.”  
  
Duo chuckled, but then his mood turned sharp.  
  
“Listen, Heero, I don’t think this is the last we’ve heard of this guy.”  
  
“How do you know?”  
  
For a moment, Duo seemed like he wanted to say something, but he shut himself off just as quickly.  
  
“Just a hunch.”  
  
He stood and collected the test results for the gun, coffee still gripped in his hand.  
  
“Well, I better take this over to Une before this hangover incapacitates me for good.”  
  
Then he paused at the wall separating their desk from the next and turned to regard Heero with a look he couldn’t place.  
  
“Thanks for last night, by the way.”  
  
Oh, hell. Heero was still embarrassed with himself for that-- he’d put his hands all over Duo, and not entirely just to help him get to his apartment. He managed a half-hearted shrug.  
  
“Don’t mention it.”  
  
“Too late, I already did.”  
  
There was a moment of silence that Heero couldn’t bring himself to break.  
  
“Anyway, thanks.”  
  
He began to turn away.  
  
“Did you manage to get to bed?” Heero blurted.  
  
Duo laughed. “No, I passed out right on the floor. Coat and all. But at least it was  _my_  floor. God only knows where I would have ended up if you hadn’t been there. I don’t know what I would do without you.”  
  
Whether the words were flippant or not, they sank red-hot fingers into Heero’s ribcage and twisted. Flustered, he turned sharply to his computer, pretending to be absorbed in the report left all but forgotten on the screen. After an uncomfortable moment, he heard Duo walk away toward Une’s office. Only a minute later, when he was absolutely sure Duo had disappeared from view, did he relax.  
  
Heero ran a hand through his hair and sighed. Shit, he was a mess. This was stupid. Duo was his partner and his friend, and here he was acting like a goddamn high school girl.   
  
Maybe he needed to stop giving Duo rides all the time, and instead try to reel himself back to a more professional attitude toward his partner. Maybe he needed to cut himself off from spending too much time with Duo in a casual setting. Stop going to bars with him.   
  
Maybe if he did that, he could relieve the burning tightness in his chest.  
  
A knock on the desk at his side snapped him out of his thoughts and he whirled to find Sally looking at him, a peculiar smile on her face.  
  
“Yes?” he said, more gruff than necessary.  
  
“Morning, Yuy, you’re certainly chipper. I heard you went out drinking last night.”  
  
He nodded crisply.  
  
“That partner of yours is a bad influence, huh?”  
  
Heero groaned under his breath and turned away. This was the last thing he wanted to talk about.   
  
Sally reached out and gave his shoulder a friendly pat.   
  
“I’m just kidding, Heero. Looks like the wrong time.”  
  
He snorted in response. As if he was usually so receptive to kidding around. Duo hadn’t managed to have  _that_  much of an influence on him.  
  
“Unfortunately, I have some disturbing news,” Sally said. “We just got a call from downtown. Public services found a body in an alley on Hart Street. They said it looked like a kid, but didn’t get close enough to check. It sounded like something you two would want to know about.”  
  
Heero whirled back to her. Hart Street was close to the river, a mile or so from the crime scene.   
  
Jesus. Another child murdered in the Drain in a week. It was shaping up to be a banner year for Sanc City.   
  
“You want to come check it out with us?”  
  
He nodded. “Duo is in with Une, should be back soon. We’ll meet you in the car park in ten minutes.”  
  
“Roger.” She hurried away.  
  
Duo returned a few minutes later, eyeing Heero rather cautiously as he slid into his seat.   
  
“Get your coat. We’re heading to Hart Street,” Heero said, cutting through the awkward atmosphere.  
  
Duo blinked. “What happened?”  
  
“They found a body. It might be connected to our case.”   
  
Duo’s face was hard. “A kid?”  
  
“Apparently.”  
  
“Fucking hell.” He was up and out of his seat instantly, pulling on his coat. “Come on, let’s go.”  
  
They rode to the scene in silence, Duo staring out the passenger window, his face obscured from Heero’s view. It was a rare bright day, sunlight gleaming on the icy streets outside. It was a shame, Heero thought, that they only got a chance to appreciate it on the way to a murder.  
  
Uniformed officers were already on the scene when they arrived, pooling around the alley, their cars flashing the news to every Hart Street resident that a crime had been committed in their neighborhood. The ubiquitous crowd had gathered a small distance away from the police bottleneck, boisterously chatting with each other as they strained to catch a view.   
  
As they exited the car, Duo threw a glare toward the onlookers that suggested he wouldn’t have minded clearing the area with a few punches. Sally and Hilde arrived moments after them, zipping up their coats and joining their fellow detectives near the alley entrance. Without waiting for an officer to greet them, Duo strode forward toward the crime scene, Heero following.  
  
Despite the sun beaming overhead, the alley was dark, perpetually shadowed by the towering tenement buildings on either side. A couple of dented garbage dumpsters lay abandoned here, overflowing with bags; from the looks of it, Public Services didn’t venture into this part of town very often to collect them.   
  
And there, lying among the discarded bags, he saw it: the outstretched hand of a corpse, limp against the cold stained ground. Small, fragile fingers, a thin, delicate wrist... that of a child’s.  
  
It was a young boy, again, he saw as they approached. He looked as if he might be asleep, his bone-pale face serene with closed eyes, purple mouth slack. Someone had attempted to obscure his body with garbage from the discarded bags, and whoever had found him had left him half-covered in refuse. Only that tiny arm and face could be seen.  
  
At his side, Duo was shaking his head, pressed mouth working like he was attempting to wrench words from it, but nothing came. Heero felt a hand at his shoulder, and in a moment, Sally came up at his side, silent too as they all processed the image before them.   
  
He had stepped into dozens of murder scenes, many grislier than this, but those had been adults, and mostly criminals at that. There was a kind of morbid order to the violence that befell this part of town, a zero-sum game of killers killing each other. Before last week, he had never seen a dead child before. Now, he was standing in front of the second one in a week. As terrible as the Drain could be, he hadn’t thought it was capable of this. It took its innocents through years of hardship and poverty, beating them like weakened iron into the adults that filled its jails; not like this, brutally robbing them of their innocence, their chance to climb out of the muck of the slums.   
  
In that moment, standing in that alley as dark as death, it seemed as if the city had become wrong in an irreversible way. Or maybe he was only seeing its true form for the first time.   
  
Heero stepped away from the other detectives and walked out of the alley back to the car. Shadows gave way to blinding sunlight, but there was no warmth even out in the sun. He leaned against the car door, squinting into the bright, empty sky.  
  
Footsteps approached and someone came to stand at his side.  
  
“Come with me,” Duo said.  
  
Perhaps, if Sally and Hilde had not been there as well, and if he and his partner had not been informally taken to the scene only for its possible link to their case, he might not have gone with Duo. But he found, for the first time in his career, that he could not get away from this crime scene fast enough. Duo turned and headed right towards the crowing herd of gawkers, and Heero hurried to follow. They cut a path through the crowd, pushing out to the street on the other side.   
  
Here, Hart intersected with Browning Street, and Duo guided them left and away from the alleyway. They continued past crumbling row-houses and boarded tenements, past shuttered pharmacies and liquor stores, past frozen gutters clogged with garbage and sidewalks where weeds and grass reclaimed the cracks in the pavement. A pair of men on an apartment stoop watched them go, casually passing a rolled cigarette that smelled nothing like tobacco to one another. No reason to be nervous; the law only came this deep into the Drain to collect bodies.  
  
Duo led them down a narrow street nestled claustrophobically between two high-rise tenements, passing more buildings in varying states of destitution. A chain link fence ran down the alley beside them, blocking access to backdoor entrances of boarded-up, abandoned apartments. Duo paused at a break in the fence. He turned to Heero and indicated for him to follow, then slipped between the broken links.   
  
Heero joined him and found himself in the remains of a vacant lot, a piece of land never sold and left to decay. Even in the bright sunlight of the day, shadows ran long across the weeds growing long and wild on the ground here. A shack of discarded tin and wood had been erected at the far side, out of the sun’s reach. A couple of dirty blankets hung at what might have been the shack’s entrance, their meager shelter its only protection from the elements.   
  
“I grew up here.”   
  
Duo’s low voice rang like a bullet in the silence. For a moment, Heero just stared out at the lot, not sure how to respond.  
  
“I don’t recall much from before I ended up here. My parents were probably drug addicts, but I’m not even sure about that. All I really remember is the street. I got picked up at ten for theft and finally wound up in an orphanage after that.”   
  
He laughed quietly a moment, shaking his head.  
  
“Getting caught stealing probably saved my life.”  
  
Heero stared at his partner in shocked silence, hearing all this for the first time.  
  
“I’m telling you because I want you to know where I’m coming from when I say this.”  
  
He straightened and took a deep breath, eyes stony as they took in the towering walls of the buildings overhead, the cold, bright sky above.  
  
“I’ve seen this before,” he said. “These murders of runaways, homeless orphans... it’s happened here before. I saw it myself when I was one of them.”   
  
His words pierced the thin atmosphere of the vacant lot, echoed in the silence.   
  
“It was the same. Kids would disappear, never found again. Or found with the strangulation marks on their necks, and if the police gave a shit back then, I certainly never saw it. How could they catch the guy when no one knew the victims, no one knew their names? No street kid smart enough to survive in the Drain talked to cops. And I never even saw a police try to ask.”   
  
He sighed, still glaring up at the sky.   
  
“Twenty goddamn years...”  
  
“You think it’s the same person?”   
  
Heero’s voice came out oddly choked. Had he been holding his breath the entire time? He hadn’t even noticed.  
  
“I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he left town for a while. Maybe he did time. But now he’s come back to the same exact place he started and thinks he’s going to get to do it all over again.”  
  
Duo turned and looked him dead in the eye, his gaze fierce and determined. It seemed to penetrate through his skin, like Duo could see inside him, see the inner workings of his heart.   
  
“We have to catch him, Heero. We have to fucking catch him this time.”  
  
It was too late, Heero realized, to keep this from becoming personal for his partner. It had always been personal. And if it was personal for Duo, could he keep it from becoming personal for him, too?  
  
He didn’t know. All he knew was the child’s body in the alley had shaken him in a way he didn’t think was possible anymore. He wanted to know the person who could do that to an innocent child would never be able to hurt another one again. And he wanted to know that they were the ones who would make sure of it.  
  
“We will,” he said. “We will.”  
  
They made their way back to the crime scene, a shared sense of purpose between them. A strange emotion unveiled itself as Heero walked, reeling at the idea that Duo had told him things about his past that he was sure no one else knew. He had trusted Heero enough to believe he wouldn’t judge him or betray his confidence. The heady excitement of that realization filled him. Duo  _trusted_  him. And he would not break that trust.  
  
Which meant if Noin asked why Duo was so moody, so involved in the case, he wouldn’t be able to tell her. How could he explain without revealing how Duo had been affected by this before? Hell, maybe Heero  _was_  already making this personal. Maybe he had already failed his sergeant’s directive.  
  
Heero still hadn’t grasped his feelings on either front when they made it back to the alley on Hart Street. The crowd had dispersed, which meant the ME had collected the little boy’s body to take it back to headquarters. Sally and Hilde waited at their car and each put up a hand at their approach.  
  
“We were wondering what happened to you two,” Sally said.  
  
Hilde straightened and walked up to Duo.  
  
“Are you okay?” she said, putting a hand on his elbow.  
  
Duo offered her a grin that didn’t reach his eyes.  
  
“I’m fine.”  
  
“I needed to clear my head,” Heero cut in. Duo’s eyes flashed to his momentarily, then away.   
  
Sally nodded in understanding.  
  
“This one is going to give me nightmares for sure. I don’t blame you.”  
  
They convened in the space between their vehicles. Sally gestured at the empty alley.   
  
“So? Do you think this is connected to your case?”   
  
They nodded in tandem.   
  
Sally shook her head. “This is a damn shame. Two children murdered in the span of a week. What do you think is going on? Do we have a serial killer in Sanc?”  
  
A serial killer. Heero hadn’t even thought of the possibility. But if he had really been around twenty years before, working the same M.O., then that was exactly what he was.  
  
Jesus.  
  
“Not sure yet,” he said to her, though he was pretty damn sure. “But don’t tell anyone at headquarters that we might be looking for one.”  
  
She nodded, but Hilde seemed confused. “Why not?”   
  
“Because the last thing we need is the press hearing there’s a serial killer targeting kids,” Duo replied, and opened the car door at his side. Heero walked around to the driver’s side and got in. Nodding at Sally and Hilde, they pulled out of the alley and drove off down the street.  
  
Halfway back to headquarters, Duo said, “I’m going to ask for as many patrolmen as the station can manage. If we have people every other block, maybe we can scare him out of getting his hands on another kid until we get a lead on him.”  
  
Heero nodded.  
  
Duo continued. “But you know we won’t get enough people.” He sighed. “Listen, you don’t have to join me, but I’m going to be patrolling around too. Every night. If I get lucky, I’ll catch him in the act.”  
  
“Don’t be stupid,” Heero said. Duo turned to him with an offended glance and he realized he needed to clarify. “Of course I’m going on patrol with you.”  
  
Duo’s expression softened instantly. “You serious?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Duo beamed at him, and Heero found himself staring very hard at the road to avoid distraction.  
  
“Thanks, Yuy,” his partner said after a while, back to looking out the window. “You’re really the only one I can count on, you know.”  
  
“You... you, too,” Heero muttered.  
  
The smile remained on Duo’s face all the way back to the station.  
  
* * * *  
  
“What have we got?”  
  
Wufei gestured at the array of loose paper covering his desk.   
  
“This is what we have.”  
  
Trowa slipped into his chair. “So, absolutely nothing?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Trowa picked up a nearby pile of paper, straightened it out, and leafed through it quickly. Witness statements from Hawthorne Park West, mostly. They didn’t say anything Trowa didn’t already know: No unidentifiable people had come through the front door, and besides the sounds of a scuffle reported by one downstairs neighbor, there was barely any indication that the murder in the penthouse apartment had gone noticed by anyone except its participants.  
  
“Well, we’re certainly off to a good start.” Trowa let the papers fall back down on the desk. “Did we get the surveillance tapes from the garage?”  
  
“About that.” Wufei sighed. “Would you believe they just happened to be doing maintenance on the security system the day of the murder?”  
  
No tapes from the garage? It was the only other way in or out of the building. Whoever killed Mr. Winner must have gone through there-- on the one day all the security cameras  _happened_  to be turned off? It was an unbelievable coincidence.   
  
Too unbelievable to be true.  
  
Trowa looked at his partner. “No, I wouldn’t.”  
  
“Yeah, neither would I. Something stinks to hell about that line, and I don’t buy it for a minute.”  
  
“Well, I guess we’ll start with finding out who has access to the security system and could tamper with it.”  
  
Wufei looked tense. He clenched and unclenched the fingers of one hand, staring at the mountain of papers on his desk.  
  
“Any other plausible suspects?” Trowa ventured warily.  
  
“No.” That hand clenched again. “The secretary and the son have alibis. The daughters, too. Most of them don’t even live in the country, like the kid said. We have no idea who was leaving the threats on Winner’s voicemail and now we have a goddamn conspiracy in the fucking apartment.”  
  
“How much sleep did you get last night?”  
  
“About thirty goddamn minutes,” Wufei shot back. “I need a cigarette.”  
  
“I didn’t know you smoked.”  
  
“I was trying to quit before we got handed this motherfucker of a case,” was the muttered reply.  
  
Trowa leaned back in his seat, surreptitiously glancing at his watch. Seven PM. The last week had seen a hundred Winner employees rotate through the interview room, each one more tenuously related to the case than the last. By the time they had arrived at the lunch lady in the cafeteria, Trowa suspected Wufei might be grasping at straws a little. So far, there were no leads on the threatening calls and no real tangible progress. They’d been hanging their hopes on the garage tapes, but those were mysteriously nonexistent.   
  
Well, however thin a lead that might be, it was still a lead.  
  
“I’ll get a roster of all the people working at Hawthorne Park,” Trowa said. “And if they contract security out, we’ll get those employees in, too. But in the mean time, you need sleep and I need to get the hell out of the station for the night.”  
  
Wufei rubbed at his eyes. “You are probably right. Otherwise I’m liable to pull a Maxwell on someone in the mood I’m in.”  
  
That gave Trowa pause. “You’re talking about Duo?”  
  
“Yeah. What, they don’t use that one in Narcotics?” Trowa shook his head and Wufei’s eyes widened slightly at the response. “You never heard about it?”  
  
“Heard about what?”  
  
“Maxwell almost killed a suspect a couple years ago.”  
  
Trowa sat up and stared at his partner. “What?”  
  
But Wufei put a hand up and peered up over their desk partition to glance around the room. After a minute, he sat back down and nodded.  
  
“All right, they’re not here.” He shrugged. “It was a while back. Two, two and a half years ago, maybe. You really didn’t hear about this?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Une really put the lock-down on it, then.”  
  
Suddenly, the tense standoff at the bar those few weeks back made a little more sense.   
  
Trowa pressed. “What happened?”   
  
“They were investigating the rape and murder of a young woman. It was a brutal case, and Maxwell let it get to him. Turns out it was the woman’s boyfriend who did it. When Maxwell found out...”  
  
He shook his head.  
  
“Long story short, the suspect ended up in the hospital, and by all accounts Maxwell  _should_  have gotten brought up on assault charges for what he did. He barely even got a reprimand.”   
  
Wufei shrugged.   
  
“Noin and Une like him too much. He’s good police, but there’s no place for that kind of martial law shit in the justice system.”  
  
“It sounds like the guy deserved it,” Trowa said evenly. He had a hard time mustering up sympathy for a rapist and a killer.  
  
“Sure he did, but it’s not our job to exact vengeance. That’s not  _justice_.” Wufei began shuffling his papers into a semblance of order. “Working in Homicide, it can be difficult to keep the cases from becoming personal.”   
  
He paused and turned suddenly to Trowa, his black eyes fierce.   
  
“Be careful you don’t let it happen to you.”  
  
For a moment, Trowa felt a pang in his chest at the words, that oddly knowing stare boring into him. Then, it was gone, Wufei’s attention back to his overflowing piles of casework. Trowa reached quickly for his coat and stood up.  
  
“I’ll keep it in mind, Chang.”  
  
Wufei gave him a distracted nod. “See you around.”  
  
“You’re staying?”  
  
His partner shrugged. “Just going to give these another glance,” he replied.   
  
Trowa was sure that meant at least another few hours at his desk. Well, if Wufei wanted to work himself into exhaustion, that was his prerogative. Trowa had other plans.  
  
Those other plans sent him a message on his way to the garage.  
  
_Are we still meeting at Theodora's at eight?_  
  
He typed a reply as he fished his keys out of his coat pocket.  
  
_I’m leaving work now. I’ll meet you there._  
  
That momentary pang hit him again as soon as he pressed send. Hell, Wufei didn’t even have to say anything; he  _already_  felt guilty. What would his partner think about the fact that he was meeting their victim’s son for dinner? This was the exact opposite of not getting involved.   
  
It’s only dinner, he assured himself, pulling out of the lot and onto the darkened city street. The boy was lonely, stuck indefinitely in a crappy hotel, his father’s death still painful and raw. He needed some kind of interaction. And it wasn’t safe for him to go about his normal routine. The threats against his father had been carried out, the same threats Quatre had received. It only made sense for a policeman to keep an eye on him.  
  
At a red light, he checked his reflection in the driver’s side mirror, straightened his tie.   
  
Only dinner. Nothing wrong with that.  
  
Theodora's was a small neighborhood pizza place, the kind Trowa could afford and that Quatre had probably never stepped foot into before, but they had met for dinner here twice already since Quatre had moved to his hotel room, and he seemed to like it well enough despite its decidedly cheap ambiance.  
  
Tonight, he sat at the back, stirring his straw anxiously around his soda, and gave Trowa an excited wave when he saw him enter. There was that pang again. Trowa pushed it out of his mind and walked over.  
  
“Sorry I’m late.”  
  
“It’s fine!” Quatre smiled. “I know you’re really busy.”   
  
Trowa slid into the seat across from him. “Are you hungry?”  
  
“Kind of. I was thinking of getting a Hawaiian pizza, do you want to split one?”  
  
They flagged the waitress down and gave their order. When she left, Quatre leaned forward in his chair, green eyes fixed on Trowa.  
  
“How’s the investigation going?”  
  
“Slowly. I wish I had better news for you.”  
  
“I know you’re doing your best. I just wish I could help somehow.”  
  
“Well...” Trowa paused. Could it hurt to let him in on the case a little bit? “How much do you know about Hawthorne Park West’s security?”  
  
Quatre frowned. “Not a lot. How come?”  
  
“We think someone might have tampered with the security cameras in the garage to prevent getting caught on them.”  
  
“You’re kidding.”  
  
Trowa shook his head.   
  
“Oh my God.” Those delicate features crumpled into a frown. “I’m so sorry, Trowa, I don’t know anything about it. They tried to keep security behind the scenes, so residents didn’t feel watched all the time, I guess...”   
  
He paused, and Trowa watched a tremble go through him.   
  
“I can’t help.” Quatre sounded disgusted. “I am completely useless.”  
  
“Quatre, it’s all right. Don’t blame yourself.”  
  
“I can’t help it. I keep thinking about what I could have done to prevent it.”  
  
“I know.” Trowa leaned across the table. “But you didn’t know this would happen. You can’t be so hard on yourself.”  
  
Quatre shook his head and looked away.  
  
“Quatre...”  
  
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a mess.”  
  
“You’re exactly the way you should be at a time like this. You lost your father. You don’t have to pretend it isn’t hard on you.”   
  
And now the pang in Trowa’s chest wrenched him in an entirely different direction and he put his hand over the slim, pale one resting on the table. Quatre’s widened gaze shifted there.  
  
“But it’s not your fault, okay? And it’s not your responsibility to find his murderer. That’s my job.”  
  
Quatre took a long, unsteady breath. Then, a stronger one. Finally, green eyes caught his gaze beneath fine, long lashes and a gentle smile spread across that pale face.  
  
“You’re right.”  
  
Trowa was suddenly aware of just how inappropriately he was acting and wrenched his hand back from Quatre’s as quickly as if it had been burnt. He didn’t miss the momentary flash of pain across Quatre’s face. He pretended not to notice.  
  
“In any case, we’re going to track down everyone who had access to the security system and could conceivably mess around with it. Hopefully, screwing up the security feed was a fatal mistake.”  
  
Quatre nodded thoughtfully for a moment, one hand absently coming up to close around the spot on the other where Trowa had held it.  
  
“... You loved your father, didn’t you, Trowa?”  
  
Trowa blinked. When he realized Quatre was waiting for an answer, he shrugged, a blatantly false display of nonchalance.  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
Quatre’s gaze was unwavering.  
  
“I think you do.”  
  
Something in the disarming way Quatre’s eyes held his made words flow from Trowa’s mouth before he could stop them.  
  
“He was an alcoholic. Whiskey was the poison of choice. He had good days and bad days. Good days, he was usually asleep before my sister and I were even back from school. Bad days... we had holes punched in all the walls from his bad days. After a while, it was all bad days, and then even those faded away, and there was just nothing. Just a man in an easy chair in my mother’s living room trying his damnedest to drink himself to death. And eventually he succeeded.”  
  
His face felt hot from the unintended outpouring. He never talked about his father. Why was it so easy for Quatre to open him up like this?  
  
Quatre watched him knowingly from across the table.  
  
“You never really got a chance to fix it.”  
  
“Quatre...”   
  
He was afraid what else he might be spurred to reveal. This was not a therapy session. This was dinner with a person of interest to the case. It would be smart of him not to forget that.  
  
“Me either, Trowa. I never got a chance to fix it either. So I have to try now. I  _have_  to try to help. I’d do... whatever it took to help my father.”  
  
Trowa stared at him for a long time.  
  
“I understand, Quatre,” he said finally.  
  
The pizza came and the conversation mercifully turned to more mundane topics. Quatre was terrifically bored in the hotel, and had turned to renting tons of movies to pass the time cooped up inside.  
  
“And practicing, too,” Quatre added, wiping sauce off his face with a napkin.  
  
“Practicing?”  
  
“Violin. Funny, because I used to blow off practice more often than not. I find it really relaxing now. Almost meditative.”  
  
Trowa finished off his second slice and reached for his third.   
  
“I know what you mean.”  
  
“Oh? You play an instrument?”  
  
“Flute.”  
  
Quatre grinned.  
  
“I didn’t know that.”  
  
“Not many people do.” He could only imagine the kind of ribbing he would take at the station if word got around that he was a  _flautist_. The rookie jokes would seem bloodless in comparison.  
  
But Quatre was genuinely impressed.   
  
“You know, Trowa, you really keep surprising me.”  
  
“What is that supposed to mean?”  
  
Quatre’s grin sparkled. He caught Trowa’s gaze and held it.  
  
“Nothing. You know, you and I should play together sometime.”  
  
For a wild, dangerous moment, it seemed like Quatre wasn’t talking about music at all. Trowa swallowed and reached immediately for his drink, but he couldn’t stop the flush that spread along his cheeks, and hastily changed the subject.   
  
“Well, I think three slices is enough for me. Want to take the rest back with you?”   
  
Quatre shook his head. “No microwave in the room. This pizza’s going with you.”   
  
Then that grin appeared again.  
  
“I’ll have to come over to finish the rest off.”  
  
And there was that funny feeling in his chest again. Shit.   
  
“Anytime.”  
  
Shit, shit, shit.  
  
He walked Quatre back to his hotel. Just a police escort for safety’s sake, he assured himself. They said goodnight under the awning, Quatre shivering despite the expensive down coat he wore. Whatever else they might have said was cut short by the cold, and Quatre slipped inside after extracting a promise from Trowa that they could meet for dinner again soon.   
  
Trowa hurried home, braced against the wind, thoughts mercifully numb. He stumbled into his building, trudging up the stairs to his apartment, the hallway light flickering morosely as he unlocked the door and entered the dark expanse of his place. Stashing the pizza in the fridge, he took a seat on his couch, and for a minute he just stayed there, eyes closed, and let the cold seep out of him.  
  
His pocket buzzed and he fished out his phone.  
  
_Thank you for tonight. See you soon. I’m looking forward to it._  
  
Only dinner, indeed.   
  
Trowa’s fingers flew over the keys.  
  
_Me too._  
  
Sent.  
  
His heart beat hard in his chest.  
  
What the hell am I doing? he wondered. What the hell am I doing?  
  
He didn’t know anymore. But the vision of soft green eyes watching him, the warm memory of a slim hand beneath his own, followed him into sleep that night.


	5. Chapter 5

Heero and Duo’s first patrol was later that same night.  
  
Une had agreed to a heavier presence in the Drain without much of an argument. Pragmatically, it would look terrible for the police if word got out about a child murderer roaming the streets of Sanc City. Appearing proactive on that front was as much a public relations move as it was one of actual concern for the citizens of the Drain. Une already had the Winner clusterfuck on her plate; another high-profile fiasco was the last thing she was looking to acquire.  
  
Their route took them past the alley on Hart Street, around Browning, cutting a swath across the deepest part of the projects. These were the parts of the Drain where commerce only started after dark. They passed so many prostitutes and drug dealers, defiantly plying their trade despite the conspicuous passing of their car, that Heero had to wonder if they even recognized police vehicles in this part of town. They certainly were not afraid of getting taken in.  
  
They returned to the station after three, the radio quiet all night. A good sign, but it was too early to tell whether the killer was just lying low or if he had gotten the message their presence was meant to send.  
  
“I’ll take the keys inside, you can go home,” Heero said in the garage. “Dr. G’s report should be ready tomorrow.”  
  
“Better get a good night’s sleep tonight, then,” Duo said, walking away toward his car, “because I sure won’t be getting it tomorrow.”  
  
“Good night.”  
  
“Night.”  
  
Heero finished up his business and hurried home, collapsing straight into bed when he arrived. The clock on the nightstand said four o’clock. He fell into dreamless sleep and felt no more rested when he awoke hours later.  
  
The next morning found them cradling coffees in Dr. G’s basement office, waiting for him to return from the autopsy. Duo had unsurprisingly turned down the offer to take a look at the body himself.  
  
The door creaked open and the ME shuffled in, still clad in his scrubs, their case file in his hands.  
  
“Sorry for the wait, gentlemen,” G said, taking a seat at his desk.  
  
He pulled out the autopsy report and offered it to them. Duo grabbed it and quickly scanned over it, expression darkening as he took in the information.  
  
“Jesus...”  
  
“It’s not pretty,” G said.  
  
Duo read from the paper, eyes hard.  
  
“‘Evidence of assault twelve to twenty-four hours prior to death’... ‘marks consistent with a flat, broad object’...” He quickly handed the paper over to Heero. “I can’t read any more of this, it makes me fucking sick.”  
  
“Duo...”  
  
Duo turned to G. “So the guy had him for a full day before he killed him?”  
  
“At least. The toxicology report is not finished, but I assume we will find trace amounts of chloroform, consistent with exposure twenty-four to forty-eight hours before death. The cause of death is asphyxiation caused by acute strangulation, like the other victims.”  
  
He shook his head.  
  
“I’m sorry, it is rather gruesome.”  
  
“It’s fucking evil, is what it is,” Duo muttered.  
  
He stood up abruptly.  
  
“Thanks, doctor. We’ll be in touch for the tox report.”  
  
They left the basement and returned to their desk. Heero went back to typing his summary of their uneventful patrol, watching Duo out of the corner of his eye. His partner sat quietly, his chair turned away, lost in thought.  
  
It was a half-hour later before he spoke.  
  
“He takes them somewhere and tortures them.”  
  
Heero’s fingers stilled on the keyboard as Duo continued.  
  
“Sally was right on the money with the serial killer thing, you know. He’s got a whole ritual laid out. Knocks them out, keeps them somewhere for a day or two, then strangles them and dumps them like trash.” Duo’s hands were tight fists in his lap.  
  
“If it’s a ritual, he probably takes them to the same place.”  
  
“His house? A storage space? An abandoned building?”  
  
“It could be any of those.”  
  
“We need to find out which one it is, then.”  
  
Heero shook his head. “There are hundreds of abandoned buildings in the Drain. It would take months to search them all.”  
  
Duo’s expression was tight. “We have as long as it takes.”  
  
“Duo, it’s an impossible task.”  
  
Heero watched the anger flush Duo’s face as soon as the words came out of his mouth.  
  
“I never thought I’d hear that kind of half-assed desk jockey shit from you, Yuy.”  
  
“I’m not saying it because I don’t want to go investigate--”  
  
“Just spare me, Heero. I’m trying to find the guy, and you’re making excuses.”  
  
“You’re not finding anyone if you send us on a goddamn wild goose chase around the Drain!”  
  
“Oh yeah? So instead, we should just wait around for Dr. G to wheel in the next kid?”  
  
Heero’s temper flared, but he attempted to keep his voice level.  
  
“Listen, I am just as upset about the autopsy results as you are--”  
  
“--Really?” Duo snapped back. “Because it sounds like you’d rather sit on your ass than do some goddamn police work.”  
  
With that, he grabbed his coat and stomped off toward the elevators, leaving Heero to fume alone.  
  
Police work? He  _was_  doing fucking police work, the kind of work that was apparently below his partner’s threshold for qualification.  
  
He attacked his report with renewed ferocity, taking his anger out on his computer keys. What the hell was Duo’s problem? What did he think Une would do if she found out about him storming out of the station like that? Whatever she did, it was his own damn fault. If he thought his partner was going to bail him out of yet another tight squeeze, he was in for a surprise.  
  
He glared at the screen for another minute before throwing his hands up and grabbing his coat. He’d probably have to rewrite the whole damn thing later, when his temper had cooled a little. In the mean time, he needed to clear his head.  
  
His phone rang twenty minutes into his self-imposed coffee break.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Hey, it’s me.”  
  
The fury was gone from Duo’s voice. Heero sighed.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
“Look, I’m sorry about before. That report really got to me, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I’m a dick.”  
  
Heero snorted. “Where are you?”  
  
“Cruising the patrol route near Hart Street.” There was a touch of embarrassment in Duo’s voice. “I’m on my way back now, though. Meet you at the station?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Heero left his money on the table and hurried out to meet his partner.  
  
That night, Heero dreamt of chasing a dark figure through the frozen streets of the Drain. He could feel the cold metal weight of his duty weapon in his palm, the wind on his cheeks. Somewhere behind him, he could feel Duo’s presence, as well. Together they ran, chasing the figure past the alley where they had found the second victim’s body, the intersection where Lorenzo Guadanigno had lain, past the empty lot of Duo’s childhood on the street. They chased their target into the shadows of an abandoned garage, and cornered him at a dead end. He whirled, something grasped in his hands, and shots rang, screaming past him with the droning whine of a police siren, and the dark figure fell with a gasp that sounded much too close, too familiar. He turned and saw with dawning horror that Duo was falling, too, and clutching at his side, and even in the darkness Heero could see the red stain spreading across his shirt, the siren wail growing louder and louder, drowning him out as he tried to call out Duo’s name--  
  
He jerked awake with a start, the siren coalescing into the familiar ring of his phone on the bedside table. He groped for it in the dark, heart thundering in his chest.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Heero? Hey, buddy...”  
  
He felt an immediate wash of relief at Duo’s voice. It made his face heat with embarrassment. For a moment, he had been terrified of what the call might have been about.  
  
“Duo, do you know what time it is?”  
  
“Uh... not really.”  
  
The slur in his voice was unmistakable; Heero could almost smell the booze through the phone.  
  
“I need you to do me a real big favor, though... pleeease...”  
  
Heero groaned, even as he threw back the sheets and stumbled out of bed in the dark.  
  
“Where are you?”  
  
“Howard’s.”  
  
Heero glanced back at his bed, at the glaring alarm clock.  
  
Well, it wasn’t like he’d be sleeping anyway.  
  
“All right, I’m on my way.”  
  
He found Duo slumped over the bar, Howard impatiently leaning on the counter, waiting for Heero to arrive.  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“Anyone else, and I’d have kicked him out at last call,” Howard replied. He helped Duo off his stool and onto his feet. Duo pitched dangerously forward, and Heero grabbed him tightly around the waist before he could crash to the floor. Duo leaned heavily against him, muttering unintelligibly, breath warm against Heero’s neck. He reeked of alcohol.  
  
Howard’s brow furrowed.  
  
“Is he all right? He’s been coming in every night lately.”  
  
Heero glanced down at his half-conscious partner. He was? He hadn’t told Heero he had been drinking alone. For how long?  
  
“I’ll make sure he gets home,” he said to Howard.  
  
“Thanks, Heero. Watch out for him, will you? I’m a little worried.”  
  
Heero nodded, and dragged Duo out to his car, depositing him in the passenger seat. He stayed comatose all the way back to his apartment. Heero had to drag him bodily up the stairs to the second floor, bracing him against the wall as he fished Duo’s keys out of his pocket.  
  
“All right, Duo, we’re home,” he said as he opened the door. Part of him hoped that Duo would wake up enough to continue on his own, and let Heero escape to safety.  
  
Duo stirred and blinked his eyes open.  
  
“Hey, buddy...” he greeted, and began to slide down the wall.  
  
With a groan, Heero grabbed for him before he fell and steered him inside, shutting the door behind them. He guided him in darkness to his bedroom, hitting the light as he brought him to the bed and placed him down gently on top of the sheets.  
  
Duo’s eyes slid closed immediately.  
  
“Duo, wake up.”  
  
“Mmmph.”  
  
“Take off your shoes.”  
  
Duo nodded and, movements clumsy and uncoordinated, lifted himself halfway off the bed and began to remove his shirt.  
  
“Shoes, Duo,” Heero stammered.  
  
“Yeah, I’m doing it.” He flung his shirt across the room and began to work on his slacks.  
  
Heero swallowed. He took a step away from the bed.  
  
“I’m leaving. Good night, Duo.”  
  
“Wait,” Duo slurred, and reached for his arm, his grip surprisingly tight. His hand slid down and curled around Heero’s on the bedspread. Heero stared at it, suddenly speechless.  
  
“Thanks, Heero.”  
  
Heero’s heart pounded so hard he thought his ribs might break. It was an eternity before he could speak, his voice hoarse and unsteady.  
  
“Duo...”  
  
“Mm... yes?” Duo replied, those purple eyes suddenly open, staring up at Heero with a gaze too clear, too focused to be inebriated. For a moment, Heero was sure Duo was doing this on purpose, was fully aware of what it meant for his hand to be clasped around Heero’s the way that it was, what it did to him to lean over his half-naked body in the darkness of Duo’s bedroom and have his partner stare into his eyes with that disarming, captivating gaze. His lips went dry, heat flushing into his face, blood roaring in his ears as they teetered precariously on the edge of something profound.  
  
Then, it was gone. Duo’s eyes slid shut again, and he flopped unceremoniously over on his side, his hand slipping from Heero’s with as little thought as, Heero realized with a jolt, he had put into the gesture in the first place. In moments, he was asleep, his chest rising and falling with easy regularity. It was as if Heero was not there at all.  
  
He was a fool.  
  
He stumbled out of the apartment into the blinding gleam of the lit hallway. The desire to escape made him run back to his car, his mind a mess of disjointed thoughts and emotions. You are such an idiot, it screamed at him, but followed the insult with a crystal-clear image of Duo in his dream, falling to the murky ground with blood spreading beneath his fingers. His face was flushed and hot, but whether it was from embarrassment or distress, he didn’t know and didn’t want to figure out. He peeled away from the curb, sped all the way back to his apartment, as if he could outrun his own mind if he just went fast enough.  
  
He threw himself back into bed on his return, but to imagine he would sleep any more tonight was a joke. The darkness of his room was no comfort; it provided ample space for his thoughts to coalesce once again into images he had no desire to see. Duo, lying beneath him on the bed, mouth slack as his lips slurred the syllables of Heero’s name. Duo, crumpling to the ground, his lips curled in a shout of pain. Duo’s hand closing around his. Duo slumped over the bar, unconscious. Duo’s eyes as he stood in the alley on Hart Street and stared at the dead boy’s body. Duo’s shirt, being pulled over his head. Duo’s shirt, turning red with blood.  
  
When he could take no more, Heero moved from the bed to the living room couch. He let the best programming four-AM television had to offer arrest his attention, and waited morosely for the sun to rise.  
  
* * * *  
  
The sight of Wufei curled around his computer with his head in his hands and a constant litany of curses muttered behind his palms was beginning to feel utterly routine to his partner. Scattered among the ever-growing piles of papers on the desk were a few city newspapers that, Trowa supposed, Wufei kept on hand for times when his morale needed a good flagellation. They boasted headlines like  _Still No Suspect Three Weeks after Winner Slaying_  and  _Brutal Uptown Murder Leaves Police Baffled_. Wufei was a lot of things as a result of this case-- neurotic, short-tempered, and depressed in an encompassing, existential way came immediately to mind-- but baffled wasn’t one of them. Between smoke breaks and these spells at the desk, he approached this case with the methodical, single-minded calculation of a champion chess player-- albeit one who had sat down at the table to discover he was playing with only pawns and one knight with the head lopped off.  
  
Also routine to Trowa was the experience of walking into the station in the morning with no idea what he might find on their desk-- save the ever-present Wufei-shaped paperweight at one end. Today he found a sizable stack of printed paper that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be phone records. They had been left, tellingly, at his end of the desk, and Trowa took the hint, picking them up and rifling through them.  
  
Five minutes later, with no voluntary movement at the other end of the desk, he sighed and addressed his partner.  
  
“So, whose phone records are these?”  
  
With a grunt, Wufei lifted his head and peered grimly over, his eyes bloodshot and narrowed to slits.  
  
“Lemme see.”  
  
Trowa couldn’t suppress the smirk creeping up his face as he handed the stack of paper back to Wufei, who rubbed his eyes and held it close to inspect.  
  
“Did you sleep here last night, Chang?”  
  
“What’s it to you?”  
  
“You look like death warmed over.”  
  
“Worried about my health now, Barton?”  
  
“Well, if you die, I’ll have to take over this case.”  
  
Wufei snorted, then handed the phone records back to him.  
  
“Lagrange Security.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Those phone records belong to Lagrange Security. That’s the company who handles the cameras in the garage in Mr. Winner’s building.”  
  
“Oh. Ever planned on letting me know any of this information?”  
  
“I just did,” Wufei said, reaching for another stack of papers. “And here are the phone records for Winner Enterprises’ office, dating back six months. I took the liberty of highlighting the number that the threatening calls came from. Now we see if Lagrange Security is connected.”  
  
With a wry smile, he handed Trowa a highlighter and the heavy stack of paper.  
  
“Never a dull moment in Homicide,” Trowa muttered. “How long do you think this will take?”  
  
“I’ve been sleeping at my desk for a week. How long do you  _think_  it will take?”  
  
“Point taken.”  
  
Trowa stared at the work laid out for him with a sinking feeling in his stomach. It looked like he would be getting homework.  
  
* * * *  
  
Hours later, phone records in hand, Trowa made his way home. It was dark and empty outside on the streets, and the brief warmth of the sunlit day had long since given over to the biting chill of night. Wufei had still been working when he’d left, but Trowa was damned if he was going to go down the all-nighter route. Better to stay up at home combing through the records than to spend that time hunched over his desk, highlighter clutched vainly in his hand, looking for that smoking gun that he was pretty sure they would never find.  
  
Besides, he had plans.  
  
He left his work in his apartment and hurried back out into the night, headed for the Best Western. He was starving, had been since at least seven back at the station, but Quatre had wrenched a promise out of him to wait to eat together, and making Quatre happy, he had long since realized, was worth going a little hungry. That wasn’t stopping him from jogging briskly toward the hotel-- the sooner he arrived, the sooner Quatre would meet him in the lobby with that wide, bright smile, the sooner they’d be sitting at their corner table in Theodora’s. He couldn’t wait, and that wasn’t just the hunger talking.  
  
The Best Western was not an attractive building, a beige square with narrow, inset windows, giving it a pockmarked appearance. The interior was not much better; he’d been up to Quatre’s room once or twice and had noted the pea-soup green carpeting, replete with cigarette burns and unidentifiable stains, the floral curtains that seemed purposely designed to clash with every color and pattern known to mankind, the bedsheets which might have once been white or might have always been the same sickly yellow they now appeared. But it was the exterior that he stared at now, trying to make out which window belonged to Quatre’s room. Seven floors up, three rooms away from the elevator, and he knew it could be seen from the street because he’d pointed out his apartment from Quatre’s window before. There  _was_  a window in that vicinity with its light on, but the curtains obscured any closer inspection.  
  
Still, Trowa found himself watching it as he approached, wondering what Quatre might be doing, thoughts far from all the work he had left to do, and wholly focused on the evening the two of them had ahead of each other.  
  
Then, in a billowing plume of red-orange light, the window he’d been watching exploded outwards.  
  
For an instant the falling shards of glass and brick seemed to hover mutely in the air, illuminated in the fire. Then came the sonic crash, the deafening boom, and it was only then that Trowa realized what had happened, and he was running toward the hotel.  
  
They had found him. They were making good on their threat, making sure he wouldn’t talk. Jesus Christ, Quatre!  
  
The quiet stillness of the winter street had been shattered by the explosion, and people and smoke poured out of the hotel, shouts and crunching glass and the howling fire alarm piercing the air. Trowa’s lungs burned by the time he made it to the hotel entrance, and he had to shove his way through the panicked crowd, eventually flashing his badge just to be able to make it to the stairway, heart in his throat. He leapt the stairs three at a time, racing desperately to the third floor.  
  
Just as he reached for the door, it flew wide open, sending him grabbing for the handrail to keep from tumbling down the stairs. Standing in the doorway, eyes wide with shock, was Quatre.  
  
“Trowa?”  
  
“Quatre!”  
  
Trowa was reaching for him in an instant, his heart too shredded to do anything but grab the boy and hold him close. He felt sick, fear and relief consuming him equally.  
  
“Thank God you’re all right.” His voice was ragged, hoarse from more than just the smoke. Wetness stung his eyes. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”  
  
Quatre just nodded, and let Trowa lead him numbly down the stairs, one hand firmly clasped around his arm, like he was afraid to let him go. He hustled them through the crowd of evacuating people, fire alarm screaming as they passed.  
  
Only when they were on the far side of the street, away from the smoke and choking chaos, did Trowa feel it was safe to turn to him again.  
  
“Quatre, are you hurt anywhere?”  
  
Quatre shook his head.  
  
“It happened so fast... the room next door just... I don’t know, it just  _exploded_...”  
  
He stared past Trowa to the burning building, his gaze hard.  
  
“That wasn’t an accident, was it?”  
  
Trowa shook his head. The room next door... how long had they been planning this?  
  
“God...” Quatre faltered, stumbled backward against the building behind them, covering his mouth with his hands, drawing shallow, panicked breaths. Trowa reached for him again, holding him gently at the shoulder.  
  
“Come on, let’s go to my place.”  
  
After a long, precarious moment, Quatre nodded.  
  
“Thank you, Trowa.”  
  
They walked the few blocks back to the apartment in silence. Quatre leaned into him, his arm in a loose grip around Trowa’s waist. That voice was still telling him it wasn’t right, that he was heading down a dangerous path, but the image of the window exploding into fire was burned into his mind. The fragile grasp of Quatre’s fingers in his shirt were a comfort that he was just shaken enough to admit he needed.  
  
Inside his place, Quatre’s grip slipped away and he went to take a seat on the couch. His hands came up again to run through his hair, and he let out a long exhale, like he was trying to breathe out the stress and fear that seemed poised to overtake him. Trowa wordlessly went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. His appetite was long since gone, his stomach having permanently dropped somewhere around his knees, but he reached instead for a couple of beers and brought them to the living room. Quatre looked up at his entrance, then at the can being offered, and gave him a small smile.  
  
“I know, I know,” Trowa said, “but it will make you feel a little better.”  
  
After a moment’s hesitation, Quatre accepted the drink. He opened the can and took a long sip, a slight wrinkling of his nose indicating he wasn’t used to the taste.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
Maybe it was the smile, maybe the shock still reflecting in Quatre’s eyes, but suddenly Trowa had to sit down. He collapsed to the couch, his beer, thankfully unopened, rolling out of his slack grip and thudding to the floor.  
  
“Thank God you weren’t hurt,” he said after a long while.  
  
Quatre’s voice was a whisper between them.  
  
“I had just gone into the bathroom, and... I heard this horrible noise. And the heat... When I could bring myself to look, half the room was gone.”  
  
Quatre stared at the can in his hands, tracing a pattern with his finger into the condensation beading on the sides.  
  
“What about my stuff? I don’t even know if I have any clothes left.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it tonight.”  
  
“But...”  
  
“The police are undoubtedly on their way now,” Trowa cut in. “If any of your stuff is undamaged, you’ll get it back. Hell, I’ll take you shopping tomorrow if you want. Just... don’t worry about it.”  
  
Quatre was quiet a moment. Then, he gave Trowa a small smile.  
  
“You’re willing to go shopping with me?”  
  
Anything, anything to get you to smile like that, he thought desperately.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
He reached shakily for his beer, which had rolled under the coffee table. Popping it open, he took a long draw off the top.  
  
Quatre was still watching him.  
  
“Where am I going to stay now?”  
  
Maybe it was the warmth of the beer, maybe the lingering shock of adrenaline, that decided Trowa’s answer. Or maybe they had only illuminated his decision. Either way, he knew what he would say before Quatre had even asked the question:  
  
“With me.”  
  
When there was no response after a moment, he turned and found Quatre still staring at him, eyes wide.  
  
“You mean it?”  
  
Trowa nodded. He had meant it from the first night Quatre had spent there, truthfully. But there had been all that propriety in the way, that constant struggle over what he wanted and what was “right”-- and look what that had almost resulted in.  
  
Quatre was not safe in some random hotel, whichever their station’s meager budget could afford, where whoever intended to hurt him could be free to set up their plans without interference from employees paid too little to care. No, that was as good as throwing him to the wolves himself.  
  
Quatre would be safe with him. He’d swear his life on it.  
  
“Unless, of course, you don’t want to.”  
  
“No!” Quatre’s reply was instantaneous. “Of course I want to, Trowa.”  
  
Placing his half-drunk beer on the table, Quatre shifted on the couch, inching closer, close enough for their knees to touch. Too close. There was something heady, anticipatory, in his gaze. He exhaled softly and Trowa had to look away. He was left staring at the grey stains on Quatre’s pants, noticing them for the first time-- soot and smoke and ash.  
  
He had come so close to losing him. Christ, so fucking close. And now he was close to something else entirely, something powerful and dangerous between them, something he couldn’t do. Couldn’t have.  
  
So fucking close, together on the couch, knees pressed together, sharing warmth and smoke-grease stains and breath tinged with the remnants of panic.  
  
He could turn just so and press his mouth to Quatre’s, kiss the fear away, suck the shock right out of him and replace it with security, with a promise that he would never let him get in harm’s way again. He knew, he  _knew_  Quatre would not refuse him. That he was waiting for him to close the distance between them. Inches and miles. Years. Circumstances.  
  
He couldn’t.  
  
Trowa shot up from the couch, his throat dry, his palms wet.  
  
“Would you like to take a shower?” he blurted.  
  
There was a flicker of something across Quatre’s expression that he hid quickly, but not quickly enough for Trowa to miss.  
  
“Yes, I think so.”  
  
“I’ll get you towels and a change of clothes.” Trowa didn’t wait for a response before escaping the room.  
  
Only when the door to the bathroom had shut, and the sound of rushing water could be heard behind it, did Trowa return to the living room and promptly gulp down the rest of his beer before heading to the kitchen for another.  
  
He opened the refrigerator, and under the glare of the light he decided a few things. He was going to sleep alone tonight. He was going to see Quatre to his room, and shut the door, and go to sleep. That was all. He cracked open his second can and repeated his affirmation. Halfway through the drink, he began to believe it. He took the beer back to his room and let it continue to assure him in the familiar darkness.  
  
His phone buzzed in his pocket sometime around the dregs. Trowa was not surprised to see his partner’s number flash on the screen. He took a seat on the bed and flipped it open.  
  
“Wufei.”  
  
“Barton, I’m at the Best Western, where the hell is the Winner kid and where the hell are you?”  
  
“I’m at home. Quatre is here, too.”  
  
“What? Were you ever planning on telling me?” Wufei sounded mad, and cold.  
  
“He’s fine. He’s not hurt.”  
  
There was a snort on the phone.  
  
“Have you seen what this place looks like right now? I sincerely doubt he’s  _fine_.”  
  
“... He’s not hurt.”  
  
“Well, I guess that’s about all we can hope for, under the circumstances.” Wufei sighed. “I can meet you back at the station in an hour, after we finish up over here.”  
  
Trowa could hear muffled footsteps in the background, the crunch of Wufei’s shoes over the pieces of brick and wood at the crime scene. It made him think of the fire, the smoke, the scream of glass shattering to nothing. The way Quatre had looked at him at the top of the stairs.  
  
“No, Wufei, I think we should wait until tomorrow.”  
  
“Are you serious? The kid needs to give a statement, at the very least, not to mention a doctor should--”  
  
“It can wait. He’s been through a lot tonight.”  
  
“Barton...”  
  
“I’ll bring him in first thing in the morning,” Trowa continued. “Just... let him get some rest after what happened.”  
  
There was a long, frustrated sigh on the other end of the line.  
  
“Fine.”  
  
“Tomorrow, I want to talk to you about his custody. I don’t want him getting placed in another hotel where they can get a second shot at him.”  
  
“Fine, whatever. You know, you  _should_  be investigating this scene with me, Barton.”  
  
“I’m not on the clock, Chang. Neither are you. Ever think about letting the night shift do some work once in a while?”  
  
“Yeah, right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”  
  
“Bye.”  
  
“Who was that?”  
  
Quatre stood in the doorway, wearing the clothes Trowa had given him: a t-shirt and gym shorts, both too big again. The shirt hung off one shoulder, exposing the delicate slope of Quatre’s collarbone, the pink flush of his skin from the shower. His hair was damp, falling into his eyes.  
  
Trowa put the phone hastily back into his pocket and found somewhere neutral on the wall past Quatre to stare at.  
  
“My partner, Wufei Chang. He’s at the hotel.”  
  
“Oh. Do you have to go?”  
  
“No.”  
  
Quatre smiled. It twisted in Trowa’s gut like a knife. But he had talked himself down from that ledge already tonight. He would do it again. It would be hard, with Quatre looking at him like that, looking like he did, but he would do it. He had to.  
  
“Quatre, it’s late. You’ve had a rough night. You really should get some--”  
  
“--Trowa, stop.”  
  
“Quatre...”  
  
“Please.” The word was a whisper in the darkness between them. He took a step forward, toward the bed, toward him, as Trowa had suddenly found himself rooted to the spot. He could only watch the approach, helpless.  
  
“Nothing makes sense anymore,” Quatre said softly, another step closer. “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. My father is  _dead_  and I’m not safe by myself.”  
  
Another step.  
  
“When I was running through the hotel, trying to find the stairs, all I could think about was how I needed to find you, Trowa.”  
  
Another step, and now he was standing in the space between Trowa’s legs. Trowa could feel the damp heat of his body. He smelled his shampoo, his soap, on Quatre’s skin, and it radiated through him, sparking his desire, igniting his long-suppressed emotion. He ached with it.  
  
Quatre’s voice was a low, sweet punch to the ribs.  
  
“Being with you is the only time I don’t feel like I’m going crazy anymore.”  
  
He reached a hand out and Trowa grabbed for his wrist with the last of his ragged resolve and shifted it away.  
  
“Quatre, we can’t do this...” His voice was hoarse, his throat choked.  
  
“What’s stopping us?”  
  
Trowa gave a cracked laugh.  
  
“You’re the son of our murder victim. We can’t afford to jeopardize the case, which is exactly what will happen if--.”  
  
“--If someone finds out.”  
  
Quatre twisted gently out of Trowa’s grip on his wrist and wove their fingers together instead. Trowa was helpless to stop him.  
  
“But no one needs to know except for us.”  
  
His mind said: You’re an idiot.  
  
Hell, he knew that already, didn’t he?  
  
Quatre’s other hand slid up his shoulder and tangled in the hair at the base of his neck. It had been a long time since he had felt like this, felt this dangerously untethered from so light a touch. Had he  _ever_  felt like this before?  
  
“You’re a minor,” he whispered, his final defense.  
  
Quatre smiled, so beautifully sweet.  
  
“But you love me.”  
  
Oh God, he was really going to do this, wasn’t he?  
  
“Yes, I do.”  
  
Then, Quatre was kissing him softly, and he thought of smoke and fire and shards of flying glass, and he too was shattered, he was gone. His beer tumbled, forgotten, from his grasp and instead he reached for Quatre’s slim, warm body and pulled him onto the mattress.  
  
He sank his hands into that blonde hair-- God, he’d wanted this so badly!-- and Quatre shifted beneath him, he could feel those thin legs slide under and then around his waist, his mouth so tender, so pliant under Trowa’s lips. He tasted so good, his tongue tinged with beer, his breath short and heavy, and when he broke away to gasp desperately at the air, Trowa ran his mouth along the gentle curve of Quatre’s jawline, up to his ear. He sank his teeth into his earlobe and Quatre sighed and grabbed for him, fingers splayed against his back.  
  
“Please, Trowa,” he whispered. “Please.”  
  
He had never gotten his clothes off so fast in his life. Quatre pulled the borrowed shirt over his head, and let Trowa do the rest, let him ease off the shorts and toss them away. He curled his fingers over the waistband of Quatre’s boxers, then looked up to where Quatre was watching him with a dazed expression.  
  
“Is this okay?”  
  
Quatre smiled. His hand came up to cradle Trowa’s cheek.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
So Trowa slid them off Quatre’s narrow hips, down his legs, and let them pool on the floor by the bed. Quatre lay bare before him, flushed and aroused and utterly open, and so beautiful, so perfect. He didn’t deserve this. He was a working-class kid with a spotty background who had lucked his way into law enforcement over the army. He fucked bar boys who didn’t stick around after sunrise and didn’t kiss on the mouth. Not billionaires who looked like Quatre did, like the statues they put up in European museums, like he had walked out of a Renaissance painting, like he belonged in a rarefied world that Trowa could not hope to enter. Not someone who looked at him the way Quatre was now, like he was the only person in the world, like he couldn’t get enough. Like he loved him.  
  
“Trowa,” Quatre breathed.  
  
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered. He hoped it was enough.  
  
Quatre reached for him.  
  
“Kiss me.”  
  
He didn’t know when they broke away from each other, when he reached for the drawer by the bed and hastily moved to prepare himself. He had long since lost track of time. But his breath had become ragged with arousal, his desire thrumming in his nerves, dangerously close to the edge. The minute or so before he returned to Quatre felt like eternity. When he was ready, he shifted over him, and Quatre wrapped legs around his torso and arms around his neck and pulled them close together, body heat moving between them like lightning across water. Trowa slipped his fingers between Quatre’s legs and worked him open, pressing his mouth against Quatre’s in silent apology. Then, he took himself in hand and sank slowly into him.  
  
Quatre was hot and incredibly tight, and Trowa’s vision swam as he pushed deeper, his mind a blur of disconnected thoughts. Quatre drew a stilted breath and gripped Trowa’s shoulders hard enough to bruise, but his legs stayed solidly wrapped around his waist, keeping him close. Then, he was fully inside, reeling with the sensation of Quatre enveloping him, the wet heat of his body. Quatre’s eyes slid open, a ring of sea green around dilated pupils, and he smiled.  
  
“Trowa...”  
  
“Quatre...” Trowa’s voice didn’t sound like his own. “I don’t think I can hold back.”  
  
“So don’t.”  
  
He worked himself slowly out and back in, even that much movement threatening to wrestle control from him entirely. He had never felt like this before, so hungry. He thrust again and this time Quatre responded, his slim form arching upward, his breath catching. Again, and Quatre moaned his name, and he was lost. He hitched a pale, slim leg over his shoulder and abandoned himself to that burning heat, pressed Quatre hard into the bed, thrusting into him again and again, blindly, desperately, wrapping his hand around Quatre and pumping him with rough, coaxing strokes.  
  
“Trowa... oh, Trowa,” Quatre whispered against his ear, over and over, a mantra, a plea, a promise.  
  
And then he was rearing up wildly, gasping out, flooding Trowa’s hand, and there was a moment, an instant, where everything drew up, became crystal clear, every nerve in his body building toward something extraordinary, and it was as if he hovered along a precipice, like a man about to fall, like shards of glass illuminated by a rolling ball of fire and light.  
  
Then it was over, he was shuddering and pouring himself into Quatre’s pliant, exquisite body, clutching him close, rocking in the waves of sensation exploding through him, tumbling to the bed with his breath sharp and ragged and his heart pounding with frantic speed in his chest.  
  
Eventually, he came back to himself, and reached for Quatre in the darkness. He pulled him close against him, holding him tight enough to feel his heart beat against his skin. Quatre whispered his name and pressed a kiss to his shoulder, and drifted off into sleep.  
  
They didn’t have to tell anyone.  
  
Then maybe... maybe they could stay this way.  
  
There, lying together on his bed, Quatre wrapped around him, smelling like his soap and his sex, Trowa actually believed they could. And when he closed his eyes and let exhaustion claim him, he dreamt of explosions where the sound never came.

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

Heero and Duo stepped off the front porch of the last row-house on the block, tucking their notepads back into their coat pockets. They walked to their car in silence. Only when they were back inside it did Heero speak.

“Do you believe his alibi?”

“What, that he was volunteering at the homeless shelter on the night in question?” Duo shrugged. “It’s easy enough to find out.”

His answer was so nonchalant that it gave Heero pause.

“You don’t believe that’s the guy.”

“Could be.”

They pulled out of the meager driveway, heading towards the address of the homeless shelter the man had provided.

“You don’t think so.”

“All right, fine. I don’t think he’s the guy. I don’t think any of these people are.”

He pulled out a list that had been folded up with his notebook. Several names were hastily crossed out, alibis already verified.

“Why not?”

“... Because I don’t think this guy ever got caught.”

“There’s a twenty-year break between attacks. Prison time is the easiest explanation.”

“I know that.”

“I asked you if you thought we should profile sex offenders in the area and you said all right.”

“I know I did. Doesn’t mean I think he’s been registered.”

Heero gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

“All right then, Duo, tell me why you think my idea is stupid. I’m all ears.”

“I didn’t say I--”

“But you don’t think he’s on the list.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“... You’re going to think I’m a moron.”

Heero snorted.

“Just tell me.”

“Fine.” Duo sighed and stared out the passenger window. “Fine.”

“Well?”

“... He’s too smart for that.”

“What? Duo, you don’t know that.”

“See? I knew you would think it was stupid!”

“Why do you think he’s too smart to get caught, exactly?”

“I just do, okay?”

He was going to wear turrets into this steering wheel any day now.

“That’s a great answer, Maxwell. That’s really helpful.”

“Look, Yuy, I just don’t think he’s your average, run-of-the-mill kiddy diddler, all right? If he was, he wouldn’t target these kids with no names. Here.”

He peered at the creased paper in his hands.

“Donald Morenson, felt up the neighbor’s kid when he was playing in his pool. Arnold Ryker, assaulted a girl riding home on her bicycle. The girl recognized him from church and ID’ed him to police. Okay? These guys don’t have the faculties to pull off the kind of operation that’s going on here. The guy who’s doing this isn’t going to get brought in for grabbing some kid who knows him by name.”

He folded the list up and put it back in his pocket, then looked at Heero.

“I still think we should check out these folks’ alibis. I don’t think your idea is stupid. But I don’t think he’s on this list all the same.”

Heero let out a controlled exhale of breath. Slowly, he unclenched his fingers from the wheel.

“We’re still going to the homeless shelter.”

“Sure. Let’s go see what pedophiles do in their spare time.”

* * * *

“Alfred? Oh yes, he was here. He was working the kitchen.”

Heero and Duo exchanged a glance over the woman’s head. Duo offered a shrug. It was the nicest “I told you so” he was going to receive.

Heero turned back to the woman at the welcome desk.

“Were there any children at this event?”

She stared down her glasses at the both of them.

“Officers, Mr. Hurley was required as part of his probation to inform us of his status on the registry. We are aware of his incarceration, and the charges he was convicted of. We are also aware that he is trying to pick his life back up now that he’s returned to civilian life.”

After a pregnant pause, she continued, her voice icy.

“ _No_ , there were not any children at the event.”

She got up from the desk and began to head for the back of the office, without acknowledging the two of them further. Scowling, Heero stormed toward the door, Duo snickering behind him.

“I guess you pissed her off,” he said, when they were outside again.

Heero shook his head.

“That was worthless.”

Back in the car, Duo pulled out his list and scribbled Alfred Hurley’s name out, then peered at the results.

“Let’s see... We’ve still got a few more guys to knock off this bad boy before we call it a day. How about... Norman McAvoy. Should live just up ahead on Brickton. Want to go check up on him?”

Heero shrugged and turned the engine. Duo chuckled as they peeled out of the shelter parking lot.

“Don’t feel bad, Heero,” he said, “there are plenty more ladies to piss off today.”

* * * *

“Say what you will about this city, but we appear to have some of the most reformed child molesters per capita in the country,” Duo cracked, smirking around his coffee.

Heero scowled. “I wouldn’t have believed a damn one of those alibis if we hadn’t followed them up ourselves. Would you?”

Duo shot him a glance from the passenger seat.

“That’s what I thought.”

Outside the car, the night was cold and clear, steam curling up into the air from the hood. They were tucked away on a corner street not far from the homeless shelter. The long wait of the patrol wasn’t frustrating yet, the crackle of static over their dead radio not yet obnoxious. Tonight they had the eleven to one shift; not great, but it could have been worse.

Heero planned to spend it mulling over the waste of the day, the endless interviews they had conducted with aging, barely civil sexual offenders, resulting in absolutely no information of use to their investigation. Bars accounted for their presence on the night in question. Neighbors remembered them coming home. He had been ready to write off Duo’s dismissal of the perp being a former convict as near-sightedness, a judgment based more on his closeness to the case than actual evidence. But the crumpled list of crossed-out names folded haphazardly into Duo’s coat pocket seemed, impossibly, to back him up.

“If he never went to jail, where did he go for twenty years?”

Duo shrugged absently. “You want my guess? He probably just took his sickness to another town for a while. But I don’t know, bud.”

“I was thinking of requesting a psych profile for the guy.”

Duo took a sip of his coffee and nodded.

“You know, that’s not a bad idea at all. Those guys can be fucking magicians. They’ll have him pegged down to the color of his underwear.”

Then, something else occurred to him and he turned to Heero with an inscrutable look on his face.

“Hey, Heero, I want to apologize for earlier.”

“For what?”

“You know, that bullshit about checking out the sex offenders. The fight on the way to the shelter.”

Heero felt bad about it, too. He hadn’t meant to snap at Duo. He’d felt like a moron all afternoon, embarrassed with himself for being so defensive. It was frustration, with the case, yes, but also with himself, with the way he acted around his partner. The way he felt. The way he was feeling right now, the two of them loitering in the patrol car together.

Heero coughed and looked somewhere past Duo’s shoulder.

“I was being an ass.”

Duo chuckled. “Okay, yeah, maybe a little, but I was being a flippant dick about your idea.”

“You’re the primary detective.”

“Heero, I’m trying to apologize here, stop being so fucking agreeable, all right?” He laughed again. “Never thought I’d say _that_ to you.”

Setting the coffee down in the cup holder, he reached out a hand and placed it on Heero’s tensed shoulder.

“The point is, this is a collaborative effort between us, not a pissing contest. You gotta know that I trust you more than anyone else to get this guy. We make a hell of a team, you and me.”

His throat gone suddenly dry, Heero swallowed and looked away, mortified. He was doing a hell of a job on this team, the way he was acting. A hell of a goddamn job.

He nodded curtly, indicating he understood. Duo finally pulled his hand away, retrieving his coffee.

“We ought to circle the block around Hart again,” he said, sipping. “The guy’s got a fixation with the place. He can stay away for a while, but not forever.”

So Heero pulled out of the alleyway and took off down the street, heading for Hart. It was business as usual on the corners as they passed. A couple of boys, almost young enough to be in the perp’s target range, stood loudly hawking the little colored vials in their hands, though some preternatural sense made them pause when the unmarked car passed. A girl in a big jacket and a very short skirt waved at them from beneath a street lamp, offering a coy smile that quickly faded as she realized she was barking up the wrong tree.

Closer to their destination, the movement got more furtive, more skinny bodies with too-light clothing darting from the alleys between tenements, more flashes of wide eyes in the shadows behind dumpsters and trash bins in the headlights. The drug runners and prostitutes might have been too green to know better, but these children had been raised up to keep out of sight of the police.

If only they knew it wasn’t the police who were out for them.

They pulled off into the darkness between a couple of crumbling row-houses, packed away until the car disappeared in shadow, and killed the lights. They were a couple of streets over from the dumpster where the boy’s body had been found. Duo didn’t think the guy would step over police tape to hit the same place again. Heero felt similarly. Their venue now was the curve of an underpass, where the train cut through the Drain on its way to the suburbs, offering its occupants a glimpse of authentic destitution before they returned to their manicured lawns and multistory homes. The cement structure holding the tracks up provided some modicum of shelter here. Like Duo’s empty lot, there were small, ramshackle structures dotting the icy ground beneath the dripping, swirling graffiti and half-torn posters. A couple of kids fled at the sight of the patrol car, slipping into the night, but there were more kids that lived here who were currently out and about, working the slums, not likely to return for another couple of hours. They had a long night ahead of them. At least they were hidden enough that he could keep the engine idling so they didn’t freeze while they sat.

“Man, these stakeouts bring back memories.”

Heero glanced over to his partner, who seemed surprised to have blurted that out.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know... I think I must’ve spent some time here as a kid.”

“I thought you lived a few blocks over.”

“When I could. I mean, wherever we thought was safe was where we stayed for the night. If the occupants didn’t run us off themselves, at least.” He chuckled in the dark.

Heero looked back out at the scene before them. Cold, garbage-swept ground, puddles freezing into dirty sludge, and a cluster of makeshift tents huddling close between them, cast bleakly yellow by the lights on the tracks far overhead. He tried to imagine Duo darting between the cardboard structures, sneaking into the shadows to eke out his survival. Where did any of that history still lurk in him? He couldn’t see it. Duo, the brash, intelligent, gregarious man at his side, who could smile while he talked about this brutal past existence, did not fit in this cold, cruel place.

“There’s an overpass around the corner that goes above the train tracks, and terminates about a half-mile away. May be nothing there now, but it used to end up right in this garage that was never closed. Used to hide out there a lot. Dry and warm enough. We might want to go check it out later, if you want.”

Heero nodded, still trying to picture a thin, brown braid disappearing behind the tents.

“Real creepy place,” Duo said with a laugh, “but it was well-known to the kids.”

After a minute of silence, Duo spoke again.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to creep you out.”

“What?”

“Talking about living here, I mean.”

Heero snorted, then frowned.

“You didn’t creep me out.”

“Well, you’ve gone all quiet on me...” Duo trailed off into a shrug.

“I...” He glanced at his partner, the shadowed planes of his face, the hard press of his lips together. “I keep trying to imagine you here.”

Duo’s eyebrows shot up, then settled into a cautious frown. “And?”

“And I can’t do it. I don’t see any of the Drain in you, Duo.”

Duo exhaled a long, slow breath.

“Yeah... sometimes it feels like I dreamt it. I suppose if I wasn’t here all the time wearing the badge, it would be easy to forget it, myself.”

He stared out at the tent city across the street, his gaze far off, the profile of his face just barely lit by moonlight.

“I can’t believe I told you all that,” he said. “I never told _anyone_ any of that.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

Duo turned toward him, his gaze suddenly very close, very near, boring into him, staring at him like he was waiting for the answer to a question he’d never asked. It was that look Heero only saw when Duo was drunk, falling into his steadying arms, the look that had accompanied the rough, dry clasp of Duo’s hand around his wrist in his bedroom. Only now it was here, in the foot and a half of unclaimed space between them, and Duo was sober and for a moment it seemed very clear indeed why Duo had told him his most closely guarded secrets.

Duo’s voice was a low, dark whisper. “Heero...”

And then his eyes caught something across the street which made them go wide.

“Heero, look.”

A little boy had appeared, eleven or twelve, and stood leaning against the concrete wall, hungrily devouring the contents of a bag of potato chips, but it was the man beside him who had caught Duo’s attention. Heero strained to see, but the lights behind him cast his features into deep shadow. He was tall and lean, and even in the meager light Heero could see he was dressed better than the boy-- he was not homeless. Strangely, the boy seemed unafraid of him, as if they had arrived on the street together. They must have missed them come during their conversation. Shit.

Duo’s hand curled around his duty weapon, the other around the door handle.

“Heero...” he said, a warning.

The boy was utterly absorbed in his food. It was a payday he must have rarely gotten to see. He paid the man no mind. Forgotten to the pleasure of a full stomach, the man was not noticed as he reached into an inner pocket of his coat and pulled out a thick, white cloth.

And Heero remembered: the killer drugged his victims with chloroform first.

He reached for the door, but Duo was there first, flying out of the car with his gun drawn and set on the man.

“Police! Stay where you are!”

The boy was gone in an instant, sprinting unwittingly to safety somewhere. The man dropped the towel in his hands and fled behind the cardboard tents.

“Fuck!” And Duo was after him.

Heero, a handful of seconds later, took off after both of them, weapon drawn. Duo disappeared around the corner of the scaffolding, his footsteps ringing out in the early morning silence. The overpass.

Heero turned the corner and found the dimly lit passage, just where Duo said it would be, and took the stairs two at a time, fast behind his partner. His breath was a searing burn in his throat by the time he reached the top, but Duo was already halfway down the pathway, hot on the heels of the man in the coat. Heero was fast, but Duo was lightning when he had the mind for it. He raced down the dark, cold corridor, watching his partner’s barely visible form ahead, until it seemed to melt out of sight. He reached the place Duo had been seconds before and found a staircase that led to a garage, a wide, empty concrete chamber, twisting off to one side in encompassing darkness that led upwards to the other floors.

For a moment, he whirled aimlessly, trying to locate Duo and the man they were pursuing, and saw nothing but shadows between the massive concrete supports dotting the place like petrified trees. Then, he heard it: footsteps just around the corner, heading to the second floor, and he was off.

Though it was warmer here, the air close and still like that of a tomb, his breath still tore at his throat, rent it raw. His heartbeat was louder than hell-- it thundered in his chest and pulsed in his temples. Hadn’t they done this enough already? Chasing culprits through the Drain’s shadows?

No, he realized, that had been a dream. He had dreamt this before, the night he had picked Duo up from Howard’s bar.

All at once, everything felt much too familiar-- the man with no face, the rawness of this throat, the dark, twisting pursuit-- and panic filled him, made him sprint after Duo, racing those footsteps, the details of the dream as they ran through his mind. The chase. The bullets. The blood.

Duo dropping to the floor, holding his chest.

Gunshots punctured the night silence from the floor above him.

_No!_

Flying around the corner, he saw a figure standing motionless, his fingers curled around a gun. In the dark, it was impossible to tell who it was, and his panic spoke for him.

“Duo!”

The figure turned, his movements wonderfully, mercifully familiar. Terrifying, encompassing relief filled him. He ran to his partner, who stared down at his weapon, slowly shaking his head.

“He’s gone.” His chest heaved. “I fucking missed him. He’s fucking _gone._ ”

“Duo...”

“I... I _had_ him, Heero. I _had_ him. How could I have fucking _missed_?”

Duo had fired those shots. Not the man in the coat. Duo was fine.

He was fine.

“ _Fuck!_ ” The pejorative rang in the shadows. “God _damn_ it!”

Relief began to subside, allowing a semblance of rationality to return to Heero’s mind. For a moment, he wasn’t sure why Duo was cursing at nothing. He felt nothing but a heady, exhilarating joy that Duo was unhurt.

Then, he allowed himself to understand what Duo was saying.

“You lost him?”

Duo growled, glaring balefully at him.

“ _Fuck_ you, Yuy!”

Duo--”

“Don’t you dare tell me I shouldn’t have shot at him, Heero! I swear to God, don’t start that shit with me!”

And now the analytical part of his brain, momentarily shorted by panic, kicked in again at last.

Duo had _shot_ at him?

Duo was a policeman, a damn good one. He knew better than to shoot at a suspect, let alone one who had appeared to be utterly unarmed.

And worse, in stopping to shoot at him, he had let him get away.

He saw Noin’s eyes in the bar when she told him to watch Duo, to not let him get too personal with this case. If she could have seen the future, she probably would have told him not to let Duo shoot at the fucking suspect either.

Heero managed to keep his tone neutral.

“Where did he go?”

Duo made a wide sweeping motion with his hands.

“There are exits all over this place. That’s why we liked it so much-- easy escape. _Shit_.” He found something on the floor to kick and jammed his gun hard into his holster. “Fuck.”

Heero began to walk into the darkness of the garage’s upper floor, everything around him vague, formless shapes. There was no sound to suggest the man in the coat was still around, but he still went farther, letting Duo kick shit across the cement behind him. Eventually he came to a wall, with a door, helpfully marked EMERGENCY, flung wide open. Heero stepped out onto the icy, sloping road outside and was not surprised to see it utterly deserted. Beyond it was the labyrinth of the Drain, a million hiding places, a thousand faceless men in coats.

The man they had been chasing was gone.

He ought to have been angry. And maybe, if it had been anyone else, if he had not had memories of that dream still coating the dark corners of his mind, he would have been. But all he felt there, staring across the empty street, was the same vertigo that had struck him when he’d seen the little boy’s weakly curled hand in the alleyway. A good place, a virtuous city, would have seen that emergency door locked. It would have seen its alarm engaged. It would have seen to it that this garage could keep its lights on, so they weren’t shooting at shadows in blackness.

Duo was standing exactly where he’d left him. He stared at the ground, at his shoes, and didn’t bother to look up when Heero approached. He didn’t need confirmation that the guy was gone. His shoulders were drawn up like they were being pulled by strings, like he was about to haul back and punch someone. The look on his face was the kind that led to Heero getting phone calls from Howard at three o’clock in the morning. He had the sudden, wrenching urge to kiss him, like that would do a damn thing for him. Like Heero didn’t feel just as sick.

“Come on.”

They were all the way back in the patrol car before Duo spoke, staring out the window as the Drain passed by them.

“It’s my fault.”

All the anger had long drained out of his voice. What was left sounded defeated, small, nothing like him. It hit Heero like a punch.

“It’s not.”

All that he got in return was a brittle laugh.

What the hell could he say to Duo that would fix it, when he was feeling so tilted himself? Anything he tried to say would sound like a damn lie. Hard to sound reassuring when you felt anything but assured.

A few blocks from the station, Duo straightened in his seat.

“Let me out here.”

Heero glanced at the dashboard clock-- almost two, nearly last call. There were sporadic lights on down the street, still open for business for another few minutes, neon signs spreading open arms out to Duo.

Don’t let him go, part of him said. Who knows how much damage he can do to himself in the state he’s in, last call or not? Keep him in the car and take him home.

And then what? he sneered at himself. Tuck him in? Tell him everything would be okay? Offer some physical commiseration? At least the alcohol was honest.

Duo opened the door and then he was off down the street without a word to him. Heero waited, the stoplight flashing green to red, until he saw Duo disappear into one of the lit-up haunts, anything that he had intended to say still buried deep within him.

****

With the curtains drawn against the city light, the glare of the bedside alarm in Heero’s room was bright and angry, balefully reflecting against the ceiling. Heero turned again and peered at the ugly red numbers demanding his attention. Three thirty-five. He had been staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour.

He slipped out of bed and went to his dresser, throwing a shirt over his head before he headed to the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of water from the tap and took it to the living room, sipping it as he stood with his back against the couch. City water always tasted like it had started out as something else. Heero stared at the glass and wished he had beer in the house instead.

Eventually, he went to the wall and flicked the light on, then went to take a seat on the couch, where he knew he would stay until it was time to get dressed and go to work again. Maybe he’d turn on the television and stare at that for a while. Or maybe he would leave it off and stare at the spot on the wall that was slightly off-color instead, and try not to think about the last few hours.

He had been trying not to think about them for an hour now, but the thoughts buzzed at the corners of his mind, rendering him sleepless, fidgeting on his sofa. Eventually, he would succumb to them, to the gnawing sting of failure, to the knowledge that a child murderer still stalked the streets and might strike again, because they couldn’t stop him. Because he had been too slow. Too preoccupied with a stupid dream.

He sipped his stale water and glared at the wall. Hell, might as well get it over with. He wasn’t getting any sleep as it was. Another sip and he grimaced uncontrollably. Why didn’t he have a single goddamn drink in this house?

_Knock, knock, knock._

Heero shifted to stare at the door. It could only be one person at three thirty in the morning.

_Knock, knock._

He was off the couch and headed for the door before he knew it. He swung it open, and there was Duo on the other side, hunched against the door frame, looking up at Heero with reddened eyes.

For a moment, they stared at each other in the doorway in silence. Then, still without a word, Heero stepped aside and let Duo in. He went right to the couch, collapsed into it, and ran his hands heavily over his face. Heero let the sound of the door shutting serve as his hello.

Duo had his head tucked between his hunched shoulders when Heero made his way over. He looked up at him when he got close, and something in his eyes made Heero take to the wall instead of to the couch himself. He crossed his arms and tried to steel his gaze into something neutral, something appropriate to use on his partner, but his stomach was in knots and all he wanted to know was whether Duo was okay. He was afraid he knew the answer already-- hell, would Duo have shown up at his door otherwise?-- but if Duo didn’t say it, maybe it wasn’t so. Maybe he would flash him that smile, and maybe it would make him okay, too.

“Sorry for coming over unannounced.” Duo’s voice was hoarse and thick, like he had been drinking. Or crying, it wasn’t entirely clear which.

Heero shrugged.

“You don’t look like you were asleep,” he continued.

“... I wasn’t.”

“I know.”

They stared at each other for a minute, neither speaking.

Finally, Heero sighed and looked away.

“I let you down tonight.”

Duo’s bloodshot eyes widened.

“What are you talking about, Yuy? If I hadn’t fucked it up by--”

“-- I was supposed to have your back and I didn’t. It shouldn’t have gone down the way it did, and it’s my fault.”

“Heero, if you’re trying to make me feel better, I appreciate it, but it ain’t really going to do a damn--”

“--I was scared out of my mind,” Heero blurted. “That you... were going to get hurt.”

“What?”

“I had this dream a while back-- a week ago, maybe. We chased someone into a building and you got shot.”

He hadn’t intended to start telling Duo about the dream. He hadn’t ever meant to tell Duo he dreamt about him sometimes. That was not something you told your partner about, even when your partner appeared at your apartment door looking haggard and desperate for some kind of reassurance. It was like the words had found their way out of him of their own volition. Something hot, like embarrassment, shame even, flared in him as he spoke, but he continued regardless.

“It was all I could think about tonight. My head was occupied by a stupid dream about you, instead of by the case. Instead of by the suspect.”

Shut up, his mind screamed. You’re going to say too much. Hell, you might already have.

But he couldn’t find the control to keep from talking.

“I was too worried about you to concentrate on catching him. You shouldn’t have been alone in the garage with him-- I should have been there. I should have had your back.”

He dropped his gaze to the ground.

“I’m sorry.”

“... Worried about me?”

Whatever track Duo had imagined their conversation to take, it seemed he had not expected this one. His eyes were wide and fixed on him in a way that made his palms dampen and the hair rise on the back of his neck. Part of him wanted to take it all back immediately, blame it on frustration, on nerves. But that gaze, that look, was like a gun to his head-- it demanded the truth from him.

Heero steeled himself and nodded, his stomach in knots.

After a moment, Duo let out something like a laugh.

“I don’t blame you, Yuy. I don’t blame you one bit. I’m... worried about myself, honestly.”

“Duo...”

“I can’t bring myself to feel bad that I shot at him, Heero. I keep trying, but I can’t. If we were back in that garage, I’d do it again. In a fucking heartbeat.”

Another laugh, this one almost a shudder.

“That piece of shit is walking the street right now, free as a goddamn bird, and all I can think about is wanting to pull that trigger one more time.”

He leaned back heavily into the sagging couch cushions, staring balefully at the ceiling, spitting the words out like they hurt to say aloud.

“The police in me can’t stand to look at myself. That wasn’t a cop that reached for his weapon tonight, that’s for sure.”

His hands curled into fists, balled uselessly at his side.

“I feel... I feel like there are goddamn pieces of me all over the place. I tried drinking until those pieces fit together again... and when that didn’t work, I came here.”

Duo looked lost, adrift, and Heero felt like he might go crazy from it. He couldn’t breathe.

Every fiber of his being ached for Duo. He felt sick with longing, it curled in his gut and tightened his throat.

“Duo...”

“You’re the only one that can help me. Hell, I would never let anyone else see me like this. Like a... mess. Like a fucking mess. I had to come here... I just had to.”

His voice was a whisper, tinged with something desperate, reaching for him like the rough hand that had curled around his arm in the dark warmth of Duo’s bedroom. There was no smile on his face tonight, though, no sleepy breath of gratitude, only a plea. A cry for help. For Heero to do something, anything for him.

And Duo knew, didn’t he? Deep down he knew Heero _would_ do anything for him. That was why he had come over so late, with no warning. He’d come to see what Heero would offer.

“What can I do?”

Duo peered up through his bangs, through the alcohol haze, the red of his eyes, and looked at him, through him, like he could see the knots twisting in Heero’s gut, the shameful murmurs of his thoughts. The blood-red beating of his heart, pumping for Duo’s pain, Duo’s happiness. Past the facade of policeman, of detective, down to his core, the roiling shadows of his soul. He already knew what he would find there. There was a question in his gaze, one that didn’t need to be spoken to be heard loud and clear. There was no mistaking what he was asking for.

Duo spoke low and soft, his words spreading along the nerves of Heero’s skin, raised the goosebumps on his arms.

“I think you know the answer already.”

Heero was across the room in an instant, clearing the coffee table to get to Duo. He vaguely heard his glass turn over, spill to the floor, but then his mouth was on Duo’s and it could not have mattered any fucking less whether he got water on the carpet. He pushed him hard into the couch, grabbing fistfuls of his coat. Duo tasted like cheap whiskey and beer and pulled Heero into him, his fingers sinking forcefully into the hair at the back of Heero’s neck, his breath short. He moaned and sucked Heero’s bottom lip between his teeth, biting down hard enough to hurt. There was a throaty growl that Heero belatedly recognized as his own, and he slipped his tongue hastily into Duo’s mouth, relishing the heat, the intoxicating taste of him.

Duo’s hands were suddenly everywhere, pulling his hair, tearing at the thin cotton of his tank, his mouth savage and alive, his breath vital and hot, mixing with his own. Heero’s cock strained painfully at the waistband of his boxers. He slid his leg between Duo’s, the cold denim rough against his bare, flushed skin, and felt the heavy, pulsing heat of Duo’s cock against the zipper of his jeans. He ran his thigh up against its length, and Duo moaned against his mouth and threw him to the arm of the couch, grinding into him wildly, breath ragged, kissing him with bare desperation.

“Heero, fuck,” he whispered, barely audible.

He reared back suddenly to pull off his coat and let it slide, forgotten, to the floor. He stared down at Heero with hunger flaring in his eyes. Heero slid fingers into the fabric of Duo’s shirt and pulled him hastily back down. The sudden force of Duo’s full weight above him sent them sprawling over the edge of the couch onto the floor, but Heero barely noticed, drowning in Duo’s kiss, the wet slide of his tongue. Blood rushed in his ears, but his mind felt incredibly clear, dark thoughts no longer lingering at the corners of his mind, but vanished, emptied out by the heady, overwhelming knowledge that he had Duo hard and moaning in his lap. His heart hammered against his ribs, a thundering staccato.

“Heero...” Duo groaned somewhere above him. “Fuck... please...”

Heero ran his hands roughly down Duo’s muscular arms, caught his wrists. In a quick, dizzying motion, he flipped them over, pinning Duo to the carpet with his mouth, grinding against him with primal abandon. One hand released the wrist it had captured to slide down between Duo’s legs and work the button on his pants open, then the zipper, and found the throbbing, burning outline of his cock through his underwear. He palmed it thickly through the fabric, cupping his balls and running a thumb over them. Duo moaned, mouth pressed to his, the sound reverberating against his lips. His free hand snuck inside Heero’s boxers, gripping his ass. The hand caught by the wrist slipped loose to lace their fingers together. He reared up as Heero’s hand returned to his cock and squeezed, breathing hard against Heero’s mouth. His skin was searing, burning hot through his clothes. Heero suddenly wanted, needed them off.

He pulled them to their feet, grabbing immediately for Duo’s shirt, throwing it somewhere in the vicinity of the couch. His own tank top joined it a moment later. Duo stepped out of his jeans, letting them pool to the floor, and then they were reaching for each other again. Duo ran his hands along the planes of Heero’s chest, mouth finding the space between his collarbone and neck and sucking hard on the flushed, damp skin there. Heero groaned, his hand wrapping around the thickest part of Duo’s braid, his fingers sinking into the tantalizing softness of that hair.

He needed Duo in his bed, fast. He wanted him writhing on his sheets, moaning into his mouth again. He wanted to fuck him unconscious. He was nearly crazy with the thought of it.

They staggered past the couch, halfway to the bedroom, and ended up against the wall in the hallway, Duo with his hands down the back of Heero’s boxers, Heero tasting the skin along Duo’s jawline to his ear, sinking teeth into his earlobe. He sucked the junction of his jaw and neck, his Adam’s apple, the muscle of his shoulder, then lower, raking his teeth over Duo’s nipple, the dip of his navel, and then he was curling fingers over the waistband of his underwear and slipping them down past his knees, and bringing a hand up to finally curl around the thick, heavy cock he had freed. For a moment, he watched his hand glide over the shaft, almost unable to believe that he was really being allowed to do this, to touch Duo the way he had ached to for so long. How fucking long had he wanted this? How many times had he imagined this exact moment in half-formed fantasies, in hazy sweat-soaked dreams? He watched his fingers explore the velvet-soft skin of the head of Duo’s cock, coming away wet and sticky.

That brought the hunger surging back in him, the frantic immediacy of the moment, and he wasted no more time in bringing his mouth down to envelop Duo’s cock, desperate to taste him.

Duo shouted something wordless and sank his fingers into Heero’s hair, pulling hard, but Heero barely noticed as he slid his lips down to the base of the shaft, running his tongue along the underside on the way back up. He let his teeth graze ever so slightly along the ridge of the head, and Duo moaned and slid a little down the wall, instinctively raising his hips to meet the sensation of Heero’s mouth on him.

“ _Fuck_ , Heero...”

His name on Duo’s lips, spoken like a plea, sent his head spinning, made him wild with desire. He trailed his tongue down the length of his cock again, then sucked it into his mouth and let it glide back out, sinking his fingers deep into the soft skin of Duo’s thighs. Again, and Duo groaned, Heero’s name barely audible between panted breaths. Again, and he pulled Heero’s hair hard enough for it to hurt, but it only made Heero slide his lips over Duo’s cock with more enthusiasm. He felt drunk, high off of the way Duo moaned his name, the taste of him, the heady masculine scent of his body. Soon, he was taking Duo fully into his mouth, down to the base, pumping him up and down in a frenzied rhythm.  

“Stop, Heero, stop,” Duo begged. “I’m gonna come--!”

And then he was shuddering, shaking under Heero’s hands, and flooding his mouth with hot, salty liquid. Heero swallowed easily, automatically. He let Duo’s cock slide gently out of his mouth and then stood up again to face his partner, who watched him through half-lidded eyes, a smirk on his face.

“You asshole.”

Heero pressed a sticky kiss to his mouth, wrapping an arm around Duo’s waist. He steered them in a wavering line toward the bedroom, half-pushing, half-pulled, until they finally found their way in the darkness to the big, messy bed and fell sprawling to the mattress together. Legs and arms snaked up to pull Heero downward, fingers digging into his back, and for a moment he lost himself in Duo’s kiss, let the teasing of Duo’s tongue dictate the beating of his heart, the tempo of his breath.

Duo followed the curve of Heero’s spine down his back with warm, calloused fingertips, arriving at the waistband of his boxers and sliding them slowly down his hips, to his knees, then slid his hands back up Heero’s legs to explore the skin he had exposed. They gripped his ass, then trailed lower, between his legs. Heero’s erection ached, hot and rock-hard against his stomach, and when Duo finally curled his hand around it and began to pump him, he had to fight to keep from coming right there. Instead, he growled against Duo’s mouth and reared back to peer down at him in the dark.

“Duo...”

Duo grinned, licked his lips, eyes wide and glowing like embers of a dying fire. For a moment, they simply stared at each other.

Then: “I hope you’re not waiting for a fucking invitation, Yuy.”

Heero gave a hoarse laugh and reached for the nightstand, feeling blindly around the contents of the top drawer for condoms and lubricant, locating them finally in a back corner. Had it really been that long since he had been in bed with anyone? Hell, he couldn’t even remember the last time. Well, he wouldn’t have any trouble remembering this.

He coated his fingers with lubricant, then leaned gently over Duo, pressing a kiss to his forehead, his temple, the corner of his mouth, and Duo wrapped his legs around Heero’s waist and let him slide a finger slowly inside him. He caught Heero’s jaw with one hand, ran his thumb over his bottom lip, retracing its path a moment later with the tip of his tongue. Heero added a second finger, working Duo slowly open. After a couple of minutes, Duo began to meet his fingers with shallow thrusts of his hips, his kiss growing more impatient, and Heero pulled back, letting his fingers slide out, and slid the condom on as quickly as he could manage. He moved back between Duo’s legs, gently spreading them a little wider, and then he was guiding his cock into the heat, the almost unbearable tightness of Duo’s body. Duo inhaled sharply, gripping fistfuls of Heero’s bedsheets. Heero slid in deeper, as slowly as he could, fighting for control against the incredible sensation of entering Duo.

Then, he was fully inside, and he let a minute pass for Duo to acclimate before he began to thrust in a slow, shallow rhythm. Duo exhaled the breath he’d been holding, his hands uncurling, letting go of the sheets, coming up to grasp Heero’s shoulders instead. Heero pulled out a little more and slid easily back inside that wet heat, and Duo let out a deep moan, biting his lip, his cock beginning to harden again.

Another thrust, and his eyes flew open to fix on Heero’s, shadowed, dusky violet, gaze heavy with words unspoken. Unspoken, but evident all over his face, laid bare in his expression, mirrored in the frantic beating of Heero’s heart, the catch of his breath in his throat.

Heero leaned over him, taking him in a deep, searching kiss, feeling somehow beyond himself, as if he was floating high above his own body, looking down at the two of them on the bed, and for the first time in weeks, he felt the world right itself again, felt it align itself on its axis, spinning to the rhythm of their bodies against each other. The city was all twisted and wrong, the evil it harbored threatening to swallow all the innocence right out of the world. But here, in the haven of his bedroom, in this moment shared between them, there was still beauty. There was still love. Nothing in his life had ever felt more right.

They began to move together, Duo arching into his thrusts, breaking their kiss to moan his name. Heero pulled fully out and slammed back into him, skin meeting skin with a damp smack. Duo’s body enveloped him, opened for him, wrapping him in burning, wet warmth, making him groan, his legs shaking with the intensity of sinking into that intoxicating tightness. He reached for Duo’s cock and pumped it roughly, and Duo threw his head back into the pillows and shouted his name.

Heero thrust into him again and again, harder, deeper, his balls slapping Duo’s ass, his hand frantically working Duo’s cock, every muscle in his body flexed and taut, his skin buzzing with electricity, awash in stimulation, soaking in the sweat, the heat of Duo’s body. He pressed his lips to the junction of Duo’s neck and shoulder, his jawline, Duo panting into his ear. Arms locked around his shoulders, fingers sunk into his hair. Duo slid against him, meeting his thrusts enthusiastically, pumping himself into Heero’s hand.

Heero could feel his endurance fraying, and quickened his pace, as his nerves tightened, the flames of sensation fanning out across his body beginning to pool in the pit of his stomach, building in intensity. He squeezed Duo’s cock, running his thumb over the head, the sensitive ridge underneath, and Duo began to shout with every thrust, pulling his hair, arching up from the bed when he pushed deep inside him.

“ _Fuck..._ Heero!”

Then, he was coming, flooding Heero’s hand, shuddering against him, and his body tightened around him and Heero knew he was gone, too. He thrust into that incredible heat once, twice more, and then his climax roared up inside him, exploding out from the pit of his stomach across his whole body, waves of intense pleasure rocking him helplessly in their strength as he emptied himself deep inside of Duo, his heart pounding so hard against his ribs he was certain they would break. He let it wash over him fully, drowning in sensation, collapsing into Duo, reaching blindly for him, and for a long time they just stayed that way, holding each other close in the darkness.

* * * *

“When I was growing up, I had this friend. Few years older than me. I couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, I guess. He was probably eleven. I think he had a home, somewhere in the Drain, but the way he talked about his mom, it sounded like she was addicted something fierce. He spent more time on the street with us than he did in her house, at least.”

Heero stared up at the ceiling, his hand absently tracing the contours of Duo’s bare back as he listened. Duo’s head rested in the crook of Heero’s shoulder and neck, his ear pressed to Heero’s chest, a strong arm draped around his waist. They had pulled the covers up sometime after the adrenaline rush had dissipated, after the sheen of sweat covering their bodies had dried, allowing the night chill to make itself known again. Heero wasn’t sure how long they had lain there, wrapped in each other, bathed in the syrupy light of the street lamps outside, the early-morning moonlight. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t mind if the morning never came at all.

“I really looked up to him. Idolized him, really. He was my best friend.”

“What was his name?”

“Solo.”    

The name hung in the air for a moment. Heero was sure he’d never heard it before. Something told him, too, that Duo was telling him something he’d ever told anyone else.

“I probably owe him my life. I mean, he saved it more times than I can count, but he taught me how to survive out there, and without that, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

“He always said, ‘don’t trust anyone you can’t trust,’” Duo said, with a dry, quiet laugh. “And it made perfect sense to me, goddamn moron that I was. ‘Don’t trust anyone you can’t trust.’ I trusted Solo and that was about it.

“And then, one day... he disappeared.”

Duo’s hand, splayed along Heero’s chest, curled into a fist.

“Everyone said he’d been picked up by the cops, his mom had moved them out... but I just had this _feeling_. I knew... I just knew. I started looking for him, all over the damn Drain. Barely ate or slept, trying to find him.

“And then I did. Stuffed in a dumpster like a fucking garbage bag. Like a fucking piece of _garbage_. And... and these marks around his neck... like fingerprints.”

His voice broke, and Heero let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and wrapped his arms tightly around his partner.

“Christ, Duo... Duo...”

“I called the damn police myself. Anonymous tip on a public phone. But they didn’t care about a random street-kid’s murder. Maybe if I could have shown up with a set of prints and a suspect in my hands, they would’ve bothered, but not for a cold case like Solo’s. Not for the son of some random Drain dope-fiend.”

Slowly, Duo lifted his head. His expression was something Heero had never seen before, but his eyes were dry and focused unwaveringly on his.

“That’s what this means to me, Heero. That’s why I’m wearing the fucking badge. That’s why I’m patrolling those goddamn streets every night.”

He leaned over Heero in the dark, his gaze never straying.

“I need you with me, in order to do this. I need you.”

His mouth was inches away. Heero traced it with his thumb, brought his hand up to gently cup the outline of Duo’s jaw.

“We’ll find him, Duo.”

And there, wrapped up in Duo’s embrace, he believed for the first time that they would.


	7. Chapter 7

“What am I looking for again?” Quatre said.

He sat, naked beneath Trowa’s sheets for the third time in as many days, a portion of the pile of phone records Trowa had brought home spread across his lap over the blanket. He held a highlighter in his hand, but had yet to open it, and was looking to Trowa for instructions.

Trowa had his own pile to worry about, but he let himself take a moment to gaze over at Quatre’s narrow shoulders, his flushed skin cast pink. He looked so out of place in Trowa’s creaky bed and cheap bedsheets, like Trowa had stolen some priceless painting of a Renaissance prince and wrapped it in an old blanket.

Forcing that train of thought out of his mind, he reached for Quatre, running his hand down his pale arm. Quatre leaned into the touch, smiling for him in that way that made his breath catch.

_Work. Focus._

“This number. Here.”

Trowa leaned over with the sheet in his hand, the number they’d determined to be making the threats to Mr. Winner’s office already highlighted by Wufei back at the station.

“Just look for the last four digits if it helps. 3857.”

“All right,” Quatre said, opening his pen. He looked down at the massive pile of papers before him and sighed. “I always thought the police had, um, programs that did things like this.”

“So did I,” Trowa said, already tossing a couple of papers away. “Then I joined the force and discovered it’s just a bunch of guys on computers that are ten years out of date. At least.”

“So, not much like the shows make it out to be.”

“You don’t think this makes for prime-time entertainment?” Trowa grinned. “I’m hurt.”

“Hmm.” Quatre smiled back, perfect teeth biting his lip. “I think that part happened earlier, actually.”

God, it certainly had. Just thinking about it made Trowa want to toss all the papers to the floor and do it again.

Quatre laughed as if reading his mind.

“Sorry, let’s focus. We’ll never get through all of these records at this rate.”

They set to work, Trowa scanning each page for any hint that might connect Lagrange Security to the phone calls made to Quatre’s father. He was grateful for Quatre’s help, even though it seemed like splitting the work in half hadn’t even put a dent in the size of the stack of records he still had to pore through.

There had been a furor at the station after the attempt on Quatre’s life, of course, and the media was having a field day with the whole thing, hardly able to ask for a more exciting series of events to sell papers over. Wufei had now taken to simply cutting the relevant headlines out of each day’s news and taping them to his cubicle walls, and Trowa had caught him staring hard at them when his eyes started slipping closed after more long nights spent at his desk.

But the real world didn’t work like the movies, and forensics couldn’t deliver them any information about the attack on the hotel quite yet. In the meantime, they were still stuck doing the tedious work of investigating the security company at the apartment.

At least he had gotten some approval, tenuous though it was, to keep Quatre at his place. Wufei hadn’t seem surprised he’d asked for it, but he had pinned Trowa with a look all the same.

“You see too much of yourself in this kid, Barton. Remember what I said. Don’t let the case get to you.”

 _If you only knew, Chang_ , Trowa thought now, glancing over at Quatre. If Wufei knew even a fraction of the truth, Trowa would be out of the police so fast his head would spin. The thought should have bothered him more. It did, in all honesty, in the hours at the station, when the enormity of their case loomed over him, weighing down his conscience until he returned home to Quatre and let him pull the anxiety out of him with his embrace.

Quatre made it worth it. He made it all worth it. Trowa wasn’t really working this case for the glory or the pursuit of justice anymore, hadn’t been for a long time. He was working it for Quatre. He wanted to see that lingering sadness leave Quatre’s eyes, the desperation he could feel in his kiss goodbye. He wanted to bring Quatre out of harm’s way, and would do anything to that end. Anything it took.

They made it through a good portion of the records before Trowa’s eyes started swimming over the numbers. He set his pen down, glancing morosely at the clock.

“I think I’m spent. And it’s past midnight. Let’s take a break for tonight.”

“Thank God,” Quatre said. “I have the worst cramp in my neck.”

They set the records down carefully, minding which they had looked at and which they had yet to cover. Quatre reached for Trowa as soon as the bed was clear of paper, pulling him down against the pillows, his hand running over the planes of Trowa’s stomach, using the tracks of muscles as his guide downward.

“You need to get up for school in the morning,” Trowa protested, though he was half-hard already.

“And you have work.”

“R-right.” Trowa stuttered, as Quatre found what he was looking for, his fingers sliding around Trowa’s cock with easy familiarity. “We should… ah… get some sleep.”

“Absolutely,” Quatre said, pressing his mouth to the curve of Trowa’s jawline. “I’ll get right on that.”

As he slipped beneath the covers, his breath joining the warm grasp of his hand, Trowa surrendered, leaning back into the bed, his fingers already reaching to curl in Quatre’s golden hair. As if he could reject this.

Wufei was probably still at his desk, staring at those newspaper headlines. Another sleepless night, poring over records that didn’t promise anything more than loose ends.

Don’t make it personal, Barton.

 _Sorry Wufei_ , _guess we’re both working overtime tonight._

***

The day after the man in the garage escaped them, Heero and Duo called in for the psychological profile of the perp.

The patrols continued every night as they waited to hear back, but all had been quiet since, The nights in the Drain seldom punctuated by anything more interesting than small-fry drug deals.

Duo, despite the drudgery of patrol, seemed more energized, more alert than ever before. And more demonstrative with his emotions. Alone in the car together, no other police around for miles, Duo snaked his hand over Heero’s on the dash, even as he scanned the area around them for anything of interest, or absently played with the hair at the base of his neck.

The thrill of Duo touching him, of Duo wanting to touch him like this all along, kept Heero awake through the long, tedious nights in the Drain. That, and plenty of the strongest coffee he could stand to drink.

Heero’s bed mercifully took over for Howard’s bar after patrols now. Even dead on his feet, aching for sleep, Heero found he couldn’t sleep beside Duo until he was well and truly exhausted from making love to him, addicted to the warmth of his body, the manic energy of his kiss. Duo seemed to feel the same. He pressed against him in the ride up the empty elevator to his apartment, fingers slipping beneath the waistband of Heero’s jeans, until Heero was mindless with desire for him by the time they were at the door, both of them shedding clothes in their mad dash to the bedroom.

Sometimes, lying in bed, Duo wrapped around him, some dark part of Heero wondered if Duo was just replacing booze with sex. That maybe Duo only thought he needed him like this because of the way the case gnawed at him. That maybe once this was all over, and they had caught the monster that had stolen Duo’s childhood, Duo would find he didn’t need Heero to fill that void anymore. That he would realize he didn’t need Heero the way Heero needed him. Wholly. Utterly. Forever.

It didn’t matter, as pathetic as Heero felt to admit it to himself. It didn’t matter if Duo was using him as a nightcap that didn’t come with a hangover. Heero would give him whatever he needed. If Duo decided afterwards that it was all a mistake, well… Heero would worry about that when it happened.

“You know, I haven’t spent a single night at home this week,” Duo said one night, laughing softly against Heero’s chest, his breath electric against Heero’s skin. “I’m going to need to start paying you rent at this rate.”

“I figured that’s what you were just doing.”

Duo punched him softly in the side.

“Asshole.”

Heero pulled him close, pressed his mouth desperately to Duo’s. When Duo was asleep, Heero found himself lying awake, watching the rise and fall of his back. Duo said this was the best sleep he had gotten in weeks.

At the station, they worked hard to maintain some modicum of professionalism. The fact that they fucked in Heero’s bed every night naturally had to be kept secret. Relationships between police were frowned on as it was. Relationships between  _partners_ were strictly forbidden, a fact drilled into every rookie’s head in training. They’d be reassigned the instant someone found out.

And who would watch out for Duo then? Who would accompany him on patrol? Who would make sure he made it home at night?

Heero trusted no one else to do it. No one knew Duo like he did. No one had been allowed to know what this case meant to him. What it was beginning to mean to Heero, as well.

He ran his hand along the braid spilling across Duo’s back, smoothing it down. Duo’s raw expression in the garage that night came back to him, the anger in those wild eyes. Not the look of a police trying to catch a suspect.

What would Duo do when they caught the monster hurting those kids, the monster who had haunted his life for twenty years? Heero feared he already knew, had known since Duo had shown him the forgotten place in the Drain he used to call home. It would be up to Heero to keep him from doing something drastic.

And lying like this, with Duo close against him, finally at peace, Heero was more afraid of what he already knew: he _wanted_ Duo to do something drastic. The likes of anyone who could cause Duo so much pain, could hurt the most vulnerable and forgotten of the city, deserved nothing less than the full force of Duo Maxwell’s vengeance.

But there were things that even Duo could not get away with, that could not be taken back once they were done.

If Duo killed the man, ruthless murderer though he was, Duo would be a murderer, too, with a history of violence to boot. Heero might lose his position for failing to prevent it, and then there would truly be nothing Heero could do to protect him. Duo would be taken from him, forever.

He wouldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t.

He lifted the end of that braid to his mouth in a silent apology. _Sorry, Duo, I can’t let you get the revenge you deserve. Even if you end up hating me for it._

When he slept, he dreamed of empty alleyways, of Duo running off after the shadowed man in the coat, always just out of reach of Heero’s outstretched hand.

***

They were at their desks, Heero adding last night’s write-up to the long list of uneventful patrol logs, Duo sipping coffee and idly fiddling with a pen on his desk, when Noin stopped by, wrapping her knuckles against Heero’s cubicle to get his attention.

“Your profile’s ready,” she said.

Duo was suddenly alert.

“Oh yeah? Thanks Noin!”

“Hey, if you two don’t mind, I’d like to come listen to Dr. Jay’s explanation myself.”

Duo rose from his chair with a yawn.

“Didn’t know you went in for all this psych stuff, Sergeant.”

“Honestly? I think it’s probably bullshit,” she said, shrugging, and the sudden honesty made Duo laugh. “But, I’ll take any lead on this case that I can, so let’s hear the old codger out.”

They followed her to Dr. Jay’s small and cluttered office, a couple of floors above Homicide. The old man was expecting them at his desk, and when they entered he motioned to some mismatched seats framing his desk. His eyes sat, nearly invisible, behind thick, clouded glasses. His wiry hair, as always, stuck wildly out in all directions, as if he had been blown into the room by a strong gust of wind. It was hard for Heero to imagine, taking in his frazzled appearance, that he was Sanc’s leading criminal psychologist.

“Come in, come in, take a seat.”

He rifled through some drawers as they sat, producing a manila folder with the rather blunt title _Drain Child Murders_ scrawled across it in black marker. Duo gave Heero a look behind his coffee.

“So, let’s review the information you gave me, quickly.”  

He thumbed open the manila folder, spreading its loose contents across his desk.

“Two known victims so far, both male, between the ages of 6 and 12. Both victims were strangled, and their bodies were moved posthumously to their final place of disposal.”

The doctor described each gruesome detail as flatly as if he was discussing last night’s dinner. Heero saw Duo’s fingers tighten around his coffee at the words ‘place of disposal’.

“There is evidence of abuse, though no clear evidence of restraints being used.”

“Yeah, yeah, we know,” Duo cut in. “The guy is a sick fuck. Can you help us catch him?”

Dr. Jay peered at Duo over his glasses. His gaze was sharp, one finger tapping absently on the folder in front of him. Duo looked right back at him, pointedly calm.

After a moment, the doctor straightened.

“All right. Let me just get a look at my notes…”

He shuffled the papers around on his desk, pulling a few pages out to pass to the officers.

“Yes, here we are.”

Dr. Jay pushed his glasses down the bridge of his nose, peering at his own copy of the paper they all now held.

“This is quite an unusual case, officers. First of all, it’s rare for a killer to pursue only male victims. The vast majority of victims in serial killings are female, some seventy per cent, in fact. This may ultimately help in apprehending him, since he appears to have some quite peculiar tastes.

“I do mean to say ‘he’, by the way. The killer is undoubtedly a male, in his mid-forties at least.”

Duo had said the same thing, that day he had shown Heero his home in the Drain.

“He is highly organized, leaving very little in the way of usable evidence, and the circumstances surrounding each murder show he varies very little from the ritual he’s developed. I suspect, in fact, that he has been doing this for years. He’s taken the time to perfect it.”

Beside him, Noin’s brows furrowed at the prospect of a serial killer in Sanc, years in the making. But Duo just nodded grimly, not appearing the least bit surprised.

“These types of murders display a need for control on the killer’s part. Control over his own deviant desires, perhaps. He might believe this is a sort of punishment, or atonement, for himself, that he carries out on the objects of his desire.”

Noin’s grimace deepened. Duo leaned forward in his chair, eyeing the doctor, his expression fierce.

“Atonement?” he said. “He’s killing _kids_.”

“Officer, please remember I am simply describing how the _killer_ feels,” Dr. Jay responded, impassive. “Obviously, we are dealing with the delusions of a sick mind, not a person with normal coping mechanisms.

“Now then, where was I? Oh yes. This is important: The killer is likely to be someone in a position of authority, particularly someone whose presence around children will not raise suspicion. Possibly a school principal, or a member of the clergy.”

“How do you know all this?” Duo said. “How can you tell?”

Dr. Jay smiled.

“It’s simple, really. Killers tend to fall into two separate categories: disorganized and organized. Disorganized killers don’t plan ahead and don’t hide their tracks. They tend to be lower educated. Organized killers, like our culprit, put quite a bit of care into their attacks. And they plan around them very carefully. This man has probably spent most of his life working to attain a place in his community that lets him commit these murders with as much ease as he can manage. He is probably outwardly charming in person and highly intelligent. It’s all a mask that lets him hide his true nature.”

“Jesus,” Noin said. “So we’re looking for a local hero?”

“Yes, I believe so.” Dr. Jay said. “If he is a priest, you’ll probably find his church within a few miles of the area the victims have been found, but not closer than a mile or two. He will not kill close enough to where he lives to arouse suspicion there.”

A priest, in his forties, working within miles of the Drain. There might be dozens of churches fitting that description. A hundred, maybe.

But it was a start.

Outside the psychologist’s office, Noin offered her two officers a sympathetic look.

“It’s not a pretty picture, boys. And I’m still not sure how much stock I want to put in this whole thing. What if he’s wrong and it’s not a priest at all? We’ll be sending you two on a wild goose chase across the city.”

“It’s all we have,” Heero said.

Duo was quiet, staring at a spot on the wall, deep in thought. When Noin left them at their desks, promising to get them a list of churches within ten miles of the Drain, he turned to Heero.

“What do you think?”

Heero eyed him carefully.

“I think… that you think he’s right on target.”

“Yeah, I do. Hell if I know _how_ , but you heard him. Guy in his forties, been doing this for years. That’s exactly right. And if he’s a priest, well, they transfer them to different churches, don’t they? Might be why he left for a while, and why he’s back now.”

He was already reaching for his coat, thrumming with energy that had nothing to do with the caffeine in his system.

“Don’t you want to wait for Noin to get that list?”

“Don’t need it,” Duo said. “I know every church in the Drain.”

He gave Heero a wan smile.

“They used to pass out food to the kids on the street, different places on different days. I hit ‘em all.”

He put a hand on Heero’s shoulder.

“Come on, let’s go. The sooner we head out, the sooner we get this guy.”

Heero nodded, standing too. Within ten minutes, they were in the car, heading to the first church Duo remembered from his childhood.

***

“Heard you two finally got a lead on your case,” Wufei said, after Howard had left their second round of drinks on the table.

Trowa had noticed that Duo seemed cheerful for the first time in weeks, but had figured it might just be the beer.

“We have a start,” Duo said. “The psych pegged the guy as a priest, so we cased a few churches in the area today. So far, no one matches the rest of the description.

“But hope springs eternal!” He raised his bottle as if this was the perfect toast. ”Right, Yuy?”

His partner nodded, carefully eyeing the beer Duo was bringing to his lips. Trowa wondered if this night too would end with Heero driving the drunken remains of Maxwell back home.

“Must be nice,” Wufei said morosely. “We’re still skimming phone records.”

“Bet you’re loving the switch from Narcotics, Barton,” Duo cracked. “They never tell you it’s just paperwork and note-taking until the transfer goes through.”

“It’ll be worth it when we catch the guy.”

“Don’t worry, Noin’s not here, you don’t have to give the public relations answer. Believe me, I’ve done my fair share of highlighting. It’s about as exciting as a lobotomy.”

“You mean I do the highlighting, while you find excuses to leave,” Heero cut in.

“Oh, real funny. You’re supposed to have my back, man!”

On the televisions overhead, the Mutts were losing to the Martians in the fifth inning. With two outs, it wasn’t looking good. Heero and Wufei started discussing the details of the criminal profile Dr. Jay had provided them. Trowa’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out under the table. Quatre had tried to call him, probably wanting to know when he was coming home.

He hadn’t wanted to go out drinking tonight, truly, but he couldn’t think of a good excuse that wasn’t _I want to go home to make love to a person of interest in my murder case_. He had been blowing them off since Quatre had started staying at his place, and he was worried it was getting suspicious. Maybe he was being paranoid.

When he looked up, Duo was watching him with a lopsided grin.

“Hot date tonight, Trowa?”

Trowa shoved his phone back into his pocket.

“Hardly. Just more work.”

“Oh, must be ‘work’ calling you all night,” Duo pressed.

“Cute. Anyway, I can’t stay out much longer.”

“Yeah, those phone records are gonna get lonely.”

Trowa kept his expression neutral. Duo was still smiling, but his gaze was calculating as if he could tell Trowa wasn’t telling him everything. Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe he needed to stop acting like a guilty suspect.

His phone buzzed again.

“I need to take this,” he said.

Heero and Wufei, still engrossed in their discussion, just nodded absently as he got up from the table.

Outside the bar, Trowa pulled out his phone, huddling in his coat against the cold. Quatre answered him on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah…” Quatre answered, not a bit convincingly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sorry. It’s stupid. I don’t want to worry you.”

“Don’t be sorry. What is it?”

“It’s just…” There was a sigh on the other end of the line. “I know it’s not reasonable for me to be so nervous when you’re not here. I just… I get scared. I keep thinking about what happened at the hotel.”

Trowa’s heart twisted. He shouldn’t have left Quatre alone. Of course he’d still be nervous, the attack was still raw in Trowa’s mind too.  

“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he said.

“Really?” The relief in Quatre’s voice was palpable.

“Yeah, don’t worry.”

“Okay… thank you, Trowa.” The relief in his voice shifted, replaced by a sultry whisper. “I’ve been thinking about you all day, you know.”

“No, I don’t, actually,” Trowa said, letting every ounce of pent up frustration he had at being separated from Quatre all day hang in his words. “Maybe you should show me just what you’ve been thinking about.”

“Get home fast, and I will.”

He’d tell the others he was behind on his work. Not too much traffic this time of night. He’d be home in twenty minutes, easily, and then he’d making it up to Quatre, the best way he knew how.

Hanging up the phone, he turned to head back inside. Duo was leaning against the door, his hands in his pockets.

“That Winner kid is staying at your place, right?” he said evenly, and Trowa knew he’d heard everything.

“Duo…”

“That was him, right? Guess you two have gotten pretty close.”

Trowa shrugged, even as his heart pounded. For a moment, the two of them stared at each other, as if daring the other to speak first.

Finally, Duo looked away, peering up at the cloudless night sky.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do, Barton. And I’m not going to tell anyone else, either.”

Trowa felt relief wash over him, though he forced himself to keep his expression calm. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

Duo looked at him again then, his expression as fierce as Trowa had ever seen it.

“You have to know how dangerous this is, though. If it was one of the others out here and not me, it’d probably be a different story. Think about whether it’s worth the risk you’re taking.”

With that, he reached behind him for the door to the bar, holding it open for Trowa.

“Come on, Barton. You got places to be.”

Trowa nodded. He was ready to be far away from this conversation. He headed back inside, Duo behind him.

He knew the risk, of course, to his case, to his career. Duo hadn’t said anything that Trowa himself had not mulled over again and again, when he had the presence of mind to look objectively at how he was acting.

But then there was Quatre, needing him, reaching for him in the dark. Anxious for him when he was away. Whispering his desire over the phone. Shuddering in ecstacy under his touch.

He drove home as quickly as the red lights and stop signs would allow him, wanting only to get back to Quatre, to show him that he would be there, always, that no risk was too great to keep him from Quatre’s side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hmmm, kind of an action-less chapter... I just wanted a sort of 'reflective' chapter here (before all hell breaks loose-- I mean, what?)


	8. Chapter 8

“I told you all I know, officers. _No_ , there is no one here matching that description. This is a _church._ What exactly is this person accused of?”

The receptionist, a heavy-set lady in her fifties, was starting to get pissed. She had seemed charmed, at first, by the two young police hanging around the front office, and Duo had started with his charm bit right away, but ten minutes of questioning in slightly suspicious tones had worn her patience thin.

“Sorry, ma’am, it’s an ongoing investigation.” That was always Heero’s answer to questions he didn’t feel like answering.

“Why does it seem like even the churches don’t trust us around here?” Duo said, later, on the way to the next church. It seemed they would never run out of churches, or dead ends.

“Yeah.”

“Then again, when do police even show up around here? Just to haul off people’s kids, or their parents.” Duo shrugged. “Here we are, coming to question them about their clergy, too.”

The next church was a rather bland box of a building on the corner of a row of apartments that Heero was sure ought to be condemned. _Our Lady of God, Eternal._ The sign was clean, if weathered, the letters starting to fade.

“I remember this one,” Duo said quietly. He grinned at Heero. “Their chicken soup was pretty great. I wonder if they still make it?”

The office inside was cramped and dark. An old, fuzzy-headed man sat in a chair behind the only desk, nodding off. Heero knocked on the door, rousing the old man into half-alertness.

“Can I help you?” he said, peering at them foggily.

“I sure hope so,” Duo said. “I’m detective Duo Maxwell, this is my partner, detective Heero Yuy. We were hoping you could help us with a couple of questions.”

“Well, I suppose I can try.”

“We’d really appreciate that, Mr.…”

“Morris,” the man finished for him.

“Morris,” Duo repeated, flashing the guy his most charming smile. “I’m sure you heard about the recent murder near your church, right? Down on Hart?”

Morris shook his head sympathetically. “Yes, yes, it was terrible. I heard it was a young child. God have mercy on his poor soul.”

“That’s right. We’re trying to find the person responsible.”

It suddenly dawned on Morris why the two officers might be there.

“Oh, oh my! Do you think it might be someone who visited this church? We don’t have a large congregation, I certainly can’t imagine any of them doing such a horrible thing!”

 _Wait until he hears we’re looking for a priest,_ Heero thought. He had no patience for the wind-up, wanted to get right to the profile, but he would let Duo reel the guy in a little more.

“We just want to know if you remember anything strange from the night we believe the murder occurred. We estimate that was just about ten days ago.”

“Ten days ago… let’s see…”

Morris looked up to a dirty calendar hanging lopsidedly on the wall.

“I’m not sure…”

But he was already shaking his head in a way that meant, ‘no, I don’t remember a thing.’

Duo looked at the calendar, pointing a finger at a circled date two spots before the one he had asked Morris to recall.

“What’s the ‘Night of Light’?” he said, reading off the calendar.

The old man perked up at the question, having seemingly already forgotten Duo’s prior request.

“Oh, yes! It’s the church’s outreach program! We send the clergy and some members out to minister to the children. You know, those poor boys and girls on the street. We bring them in for the night and give them some food and shelter in the name of the Lord.”

“You do that a lot?”

“From time to time. We have a long history of ministering to the poor homeless children in the neighborhood, but unfortunately we let the tradition of the Night of Light slip for a long time. Now that Father Davis is back, though, he insisted we start again!”

His eyes shone as he spoke, like the good father was so wonderful the mere thought of him brought the old codger to tears.

“I’m so grateful he did, honestly. It’s been such a blessing to help those poor kids in need.”

Heero felt his chest lurch and he took a step forward, suddenly very interested in Morris’s bland rambling.

“Oh?” Duo said evenly, but his eyes were sharp. “Father Davis, you said?”

“Yes, our bishop. A wonderful man. He cares so deeply about the neighborhood, you see, for all its ills.”

“You said he was back from somewhere.”

“Yes, just recently, actually! He was a priest here many years ago, just out of seminary, when he was quite young. I’ve been a member here for many, many years, and I remember him at just twenty-two, already such an upstanding member of the clergy--”

“-- so he left?” Heero cut in, any patience he had afforded the old man for this meandering story long gone. They had been to too many churches in the last week to waste any more time.

“Well, no, he was called, you see, to Blessed Sacrament in Mooreland. That was quite a long time ago. But our church recently lost its bishop, and Father Davis took the call to return to us. Thank God, it’s truly a blessing for the neighborhood to have him back after so long.”

“Where’s Father Davis now?”

“Let’s see, he might be in his office downstairs...”

Morris suddenly seemed to have a thought.

”You should talk to him! He might have some help on your case. He is so wonderful with the local children, and I know the terrible crime here truly plagues his heart. I’m sure he would have some information that can help you, officers.”

“I hope he does,” Duo said, already halfway out the door. “Thanks Morris, you’ve been a great help.”

Outside the office, Duo turned toward the exit doors instead of the stairway. Heero followed him around the corner, until he slowed, a block or so down from the church. Duo cast a look around to make sure no one was nearby to overhear them before turning to Heero, a look of wild victory in his eyes.

“It’s him.”

“It might be,” Heero replied carefully. “We don’t know for sure yet.”

“You heard what that old man said. It was _creepy_.” Duo paced on the sidewalk as he spoke.

“I know what you mean.” Heero remembered the hair rising on his arms as Morris, describing the bishop’s return, had unwittingly parroted the details of the psychological profile back to them. “But we have to be careful in there.”

Duo nodded along. “We can’t make it sound like we suspect him.”

“How do you want to handle it?”

“We ask him about the Night of Light or whatever the hell it is. Ask him if he knew the victim. If he saw him that night or not. Just keep him occupied with questions about the murder and see if something slips.”

Heero nodded.

“All right.”

Watching Duo dance around the pavement, he almost added, _are you going to be okay?_ But no, he had to trust that Duo wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize this, after so long. He’d be there, anyway, to make sure. That was his job in all this, after all. Let Duo catch his monster, but try to avert disaster.

He would stop Duo before anything happened. He was sure of it.

They turned and began walking back to the church.

***

“You fucking did it, Barton,” Wufei barked, slamming a stack of paper down on Trowa’s desk.

Trowa was immediately on high alert, going rigid at Wufei’s tone.

“Did what?”

Wufei jammed his finger at a line on the paper on top of the pile.

“Look familiar?”

Heart in his throat, Trowa peered at the text where Wufei was pointing. There was a number, highlighted in red, ending in 3857.

Relief washed over him. Of course, the number. Not Quatre. Just the phone number.

Wait, the phone number!

“You found it?”

“Technically, _you_ found it,” Wufei replied, his stern expression, nigh furious, breaking into something resembling excitement. “There was a match with a company: Lagrange Construction. Not their public number, but it was close, so I pulled some strings with the guys that hooked up their phone service and got the listing of all their requested lines. And voila.”

The chance at a real break in the case was making Wufei almost theatrical. Trowa picked up a few of the papers Wufei had brought over, thumbing through them.

“What’s all this?”

“A little research on these guys and their dealings with Winner,” Wufei said. “That’s the no-bid contract on 66 Hawthorne Park West you’re holding. Built by our friends at Lagrange.”

“They built the building…”

“And a few of the other ones Winner owned. And not much else.”

“Sounds like a front,” Trowa said.

“Sure as hell does.”

“I’m guessing the 3857 number doesn’t work.”

“None of their numbers work, actually. And the supposed headquarters is a junkyard in South End.”

Trowa sighed. It all sounded like another dead end to him. It was a testament to how thin their leads had been until now that Wufei seemed downright cheerful about the news.

“You don’t seem all that bothered,” he said to Wufei.

Wufei shrugged.

“It’s something, right? And we’ve got Winner’s private financial records from his secretary. I requested the official documents on all the projects Lagrange worked on. We’ll start there and see if there’s anything to be found.”

He reached for his coat.

“Where are you going?” Trowa said, watching Wufei shrug it on.

“I’m going to go check out this junkyard,” Wufei replied. He rapped his knuckles on the pile of papers. ”You stay here and wait for those documents.”

“Gee, thanks. Leaving the fun stuff to me.”

“At least you won’t be out freezing your balls off in South End Harbor. I’m doing you a favor, really.”

Then he was off to the garage, leaving Trowa with the pile of papers and a lot of waiting around to do.

He filled that time with locating the records they’d gotten from the secretary and combing through them for references to Lagrange. Might as well make himself useful while Wufei did the investigating, after all.

“Lagrange” was nowhere to be found in any of Winner’s books, but “LG” and “LGC” and even “LG Construction” turned up records stretching back for years, with notes on which buildings the payments related to. Payments for building materials. Payments for security. Trowa’s eyes bugged at the numbers written next to each entry. The world of the wealthy might as well have been another universe from the one he lived in-- the flippant passing of millions of dollars back and forth was proof enough of that. More money than he’d ever see in his life, traded over with the flick of a pen.

And in the end, Winner was still dead. What was there to show for it?

His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out. It seemed unlikely Wufei could make it all the way to South End that quickly. Sure enough, It was Quatre’s name that flickered on the screen.

_I was thinking about you. How’s work going?_

For once, Trowa had something positive to say on that front.

_We might have a break. I’m not totally sure yet, it’s a little early to say. I’ll tell you about it later._

Something as small as a quick message from Quatre could make Trowa’s whole body warm. He was sure he’d never felt like this ever in his life, so wound up over someone. He could imagine Quatre, pretending to study, texting him surreptitiously under his desk. Did he feel like this when he saw Trowa’s name on his phone, too? Judging by the way Quatre leapt at him when he came home every night, he thought that maybe he did. He certainly seemed like he was as wild about Trowa, for whatever unfathomable reason, that Trowa was about him.

The blaring of his desk phone drew him sharply out of his wandering thoughts and back into the present. He reached quickly to answer it.

“Sanc City Police. This is Detective Barton.”

“Yes, hello. This is Margaret Wilson with the City Clerk’s office. We have Detective Chang’s request for the Winner construction documents ready. Shall we fax them over?”

He always liked dealing with the City Clerk people, they never wasted time with unnecessary conversation.

“Yes, absolutely. Thanks for getting them to us so soon.”

The act of printing the documents proved to be a sizeable endeavor for their beleaguered office fax machine. Trowa hovered impatiently as the old, half-defunct machine laboriously produced one page, then another, then slowly, tiredly moved to the next. After ten minutes, he enlisted a sympathetic secretary to wait in his stead and went to spend the remaining time grabbing a coffee from the shop down the street. Black, so he wouldn’t drink it too fast. He had a feeling he’d be waiting a long time.

The secretary brought the documents to his desk when they were finally finished printing, even arranging them neatly in separate folders and labeling them with project names and dates. Certainly a nicer job than he would have done, in his impatience.

It was late afternoon when Trowa finally started the work of matching the entries in Winner’s personal ledgers with the official financial documents. It wasn’t long, though, before he realized he and Wufei weren’t going to be going home anytime soon.

The numbers didn’t match. The financial records from the city detailed payments at a fraction of the millions Winner had written in his own books. Most of the payments to Lagrange hadn’t been reported at all, making the cost of building the properties far lower than what they would have been with all of the secret payments included.

Trowa was still poring over the records when Wufei finally called him.

“Wufei? Did you find anything?”

“Yeah, I’m at the junkyard.” He sounded exasperated and cold. “Let me paint you a picture: completely falling apart, looks like it’s been deserted for years. _Except_ the fancy, heavily secured front door and the barbed wire fencing covering the place.”

“Was anyone there?”

“Nah. Like I said, if it wasn’t for the intense security, I would think this place was condemned. It’s called Steel Cross Junkers. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Trowa, staring down at the mismatching rows of dated payments, sat up quickly.

“Actually, it does.”

“Oh?”

“From Narcotics. We busted a cocaine ring last year, a mafia endeavor. It was called the Steel Cross Exchange.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line.

“...Shit. The mob.”

“Yeah. And I found something too, Wufei. In the financial records.”

He could hear Wufei hustling back to the car, his voice coming a little out of breath through the phone.

“What did you find?”

“Well, I’m no expert in white-collar crime, but this looks like Winner was laundering money through these building projects.”

Wufei slammed the car door and cursed.

“For the fucking mob?”

“Looks like it.”

“Shit.” Wufei sighed. “All right, I’m on my way back. The mafia. Fucking hell, Barton. This case just gets better and better.”

By the time Wufei had arrived back at the station and secured them a room to talk, the pieces of the puzzle had begun to fall together for Trowa.

It seemed they had for Wufei, too. He paced around the small room they locked themselves into, the financial records spread out across the table between them.

“So Winner agrees to launder the mafia’s money.” Wufei had picked up one of the city clerk’s documents to flip through as he spoke, more as a nervous gesture than to actually scrutinize it. “He wanted to stop, or he couldn’t pay, or they wanted more money, or he started getting nervous. The mafia starts threatening him. Maybe they came to roughen him up, and he fought back, and it got out of hand. Does that sound plausible?”

Trowa shrugged. “Sure.”

“What the hell was a guy like Frank Winner doing getting involved with the mob, anyway? I can’t understand it.”

Trowa picked up the book containing Frank Winner’s private records, handing it to Wufei.

“Read it from Winner himself,” he said. “At least he was honest in secret.”

Trowa flipped to one of the pages he’d marked, the listings reading dates from a decade ago. He traded Wufei his documents for the private ledger.

“Those records go back to the recession. Seems like he had a rough couple of years when the economy got really bad. Not a lot of interested parties jumping to invest in luxury apartments when unemployment was at nine percent, I guess.”

“A lot of people had a rough time in the crash,” Wufei said, “it’s something else to turn to organized crime because your pockets got thinner.”

“You can take a look at the revenue lists in there for yourself. He was massively overleveraged. Debt up to his eyeballs.”

Wufei nodded along. “So he got desperate.”

“He started the first partnership with Lagrange a couple of years after he started really losing money. I’d say he was pretty desperate.”

“Gotta keep the shareholders happy, right? By any means necessary.”

Wufei closed the ledger and turned to his partner.

“You said you worked a Steel Cross case in Narcotics. Do you have any contacts from then? Informants?”

“Yeah, my old partner had a few guys.”

“See if you can get any of them down to the station tomorrow. See what shakes loose. I’ll take this to Noin.”

Staring down at the papers on the table, Wufei suddenly looked tired.

“What a mess, huh?”

Trowa nodded, looking at the lines on his partner’s face that looked like they’d taken weeks to develop, and wondering just how many he had to match.

“You’re telling me.”

It was hours later, far past midnight, when Trowa finally got home, keeping as quiet as he could as he opened the door and removed his shoes. He slipped in through the half-open bedroom door, fumbling the rest of his clothes off in the darkness. The gently rising and setting form of Quatre, asleep in his bed, took shape in the shadows as his eyes acclimated to the dim light.

God, was he happy to see him.

Quatre stretched and curled back into him as he climbed into the bed, his body warm from the blankets as he reached behind him to take one of Trowa’s arms and pull it sleepily around his waist.

“Mm… it’s late,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” Trowa whispered, pressing a kiss to Quatre’s pale shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”

“You said something about a break in the case before, did that work out?”

All at once, Trowa realized he couldn’t tell Quatre what they’d learned. That his father had become desperate enough at the prospect of financial ruin that he’d turned to collaborating with the mafia. That he had apparently decided that it was better to be a criminal than a pauper. That the upstanding man that Quatre idolized, the one so outwardly devoted to his work and his legacy, was a coward and a criminal.

What good would it do to tell Quatre any of that now? He would find out eventually, when they were ready to make their case, when the press got wind of it all. But for now, he could let Quatre sleep. He could let him continue to believe in the better version of his father.

“Not sure yet,” Trowa lied, his arms tightening around Quatre in secret apology. “We’ll know more tomorrow.”

That, at least, was true. And it seemed to be enough, because Quatre was already drifting off back to sleep. Trowa buried his face in that soft head of hair, more than ready to join him.

***

The first thing Heero thought, standing in the doorway, was how clean Father Davis kept his office. Brand new, immaculate, like he’d had it painted upon his return. The furniture looked new, too, with a couple of red upholstered chairs in the middle of the room that looked like they’d yet to be sat in. A coat rack stood by the door, a good-quality but unadorned coat draped over its arm. The paint job gleamed in the otherwise dusty and care-worn church.

Father Davis, the prodigal bishop, was a neat and well-groomed man, the fact that he was in his forties rather well-hidden if not for the bit of greying hair at his temples. He rose as they knocked on the door, unfolding like a flag, taller than Heero had expected.

“Welcome, officers,” he said, and Heero knew Morris had told him they’d be down to see him.

“Afternoon,” Duo said, “hope you don’t mind us dropping by unannounced.”

“Oh, it’s no bother at all. And please, come inside, you don’t have to stand in the doorway.”

They entered, declining to sit in the chairs, instead taking corners of the room, scanning the walls surreptitiously. There was not much to see: A calendar like the one Morris kept. Some kind of certificate of his Godly authority or something. A picture of him when he was younger, probably, because there was no hint of grey in his hair. He had one arm around a woman, the other around a kid. Duo’s eyes found the picture and rested there, staring at that younger face on Davis, the smiling child under his arm.

“Officers Maxwell and Yuy,” Heero said.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Michael Davis. I’m the bishop at this church.”

“So we’ve heard,” Duo turned away from the picture on the wall to look at the priest. “Morris had a lot of really nice things to say about you.”

“I’ve known Mr. Morris a long time, since I was a much younger man,” Davis replied. “I think he takes a bit of a fatherly tone to me as a result.”

“Yeah, seems like it.”

“I’m very fortunate to have had long relationships with the members here. It felt like a homecoming, coming back to Sanc after so long.”

Heero had never been one to put much stock in things like ‘kind eyes’ or ‘gentle voice’ as a testament to whether or not someone could be trusted. Not all criminals came with a look as hard-edged as their rap sheets, and he’d seem some baby-faced killers in his time.

That being said, he noted the genial, soft-edged dip of the bishop’s eyes, the even, almost soothing nature of his voice. Maybe even the sort of voice, the sort of eyes that made people who _did_ take stock in those things trust someone implicitly.

If all that was a front for a child killer, a ruthless predator, it was certainly effective.

“Morris told me you had some questions about what happened to poor Luis,” Davis continued.

Until that moment, they had not known the latest victim was named Luis.

Duo’s voice was remarkably even, given that small revelation.

“Yes, we did. Did you know him?”

“I did know him. He was a regular fixture around here, actually. We do a lot of work with the street kids. We run a soup kitchen so they have something to eat.”

“Chicken soup,” Duo cut in, and Davis looked surprised. “I was one of those street kids, once,” he explained.

For a moment, it looked like Davis was trying to recognize him. His eyes narrowed as they ran over Duo’s face, but appeared to come up short.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said eventually. “I wonder if we ever met before, Officer Maxwell. I used to work in this neighborhood a long time ago.”

“I don’t think we did,” Duo said, just as evenly. “I would remember.”

“Yes, I would too.”

Then, suddenly, Davis laughed. A way to diffuse some of the collecting tension, Heero supposed. It worked a little.

“When was the last time you saw Luis, Father?” Heero said.

“Well, Morris may have told you, but we have an overnight outreach we perform in the neighborhood every couple of weeks, the Night of Light. We try to bring the neighborhood children in for some safety. And to hear the Lord’s word.”

“That’s the last time you saw him?”

“No, in fact, I thought it was strange that I didn’t see him. He’s usually the first one here when there’s free food.”

There was nothing outwardly unnatural about the way Davis said this, the way he looked when he did. But Heero got a strange feeling. If it wasn’t the last time he saw the boy, then why bring it up at all? To proactively try to deny something neither of them had accused him of?

“Did you see anything strange that night?” Heero continued. “Anyone you didn’t recognize?”

“There are always people I don’t recognize driving through these streets at night, as I’m sure you well know, officers. People who come from the nicer parts of town to take advantage of what they perceive this neighborhood has to offer.” He shook his head as he said this, for emphasis, looking pained at the thought. “I fear it was one of those people who might have done something terrible to that poor boy.”

“It’s funny,” Duo cut in then, “because we believe the opposite.”

“Oh?”

“We believe it was someone Luis knew. Someone he trusted.”

“That’s an interesting belief, Officer Maxwell. Why would you say that?”

Duo gave an overly nonchalant shrug.

“Just a conclusion we came to through the course of the investigation. Lots of small things at the scene. Forensic evidence, that kind of thing.”

He was bullshitting, of course, all they had was the psych profile and Duo’s instincts making all the decisions so far. But Heero could see the words registering in Davis’s face, in the shift of his eyebrows from surprise to curiosity.

“You see, these poor kids on the street don’t have a lot of figures in their lives they trust, as you surely know, Officer Maxwell,” Davis said, his eyes watching Duo’s.

“I do, Father. One of the things I learned back then was knowing who to trust was a matter of life and death.” He stared right back as he spoke, matching Davis’s gaze.

“Indeed. Well, I find it interesting that the police believe Luis might have been killed by someone he trusted, since he might not have had anyone who filled that position.”

Duo’s expression was as nonchalant as could be as he said, “well, not no one, right, Father? He had you, for example.”

Heero straightened, still watching from the corner of the room. Duo didn’t necessarily make it sound like an accusation. And Davis didn’t seem to take it like one, though he sat back in his chair, still looking directly at Duo, seemingly unfazed by the direction of the conversation.

“Yes, I suppose he did.”

“When you all go out at night and collect all the street kids, is it just one big group?”

“No, not always.” Davis was still smiling.

“So, not everyone in the church who is participating is always accounted for.”

“No, they’re not.”

“How hard would it be, do you think, to slip away from the rest of the group, maybe for the entire night?”

“I suppose not very hard. If one really wanted to.”

Kind eyes, and a gentle voice. Powerful weapons, if they made someone trust you. Davis was tall, rather broad, in better shape than maybe most men his age. Did he resemble the shadow in the garage, the night they chased a suspect down? Try as he might, Heero couldn’t be sure.

It wasn’t enough. And whatever bait Duo was trying to lay for him, he wasn’t taking it. He could see the frustration beginning to seep around the edges of Duo’s careful expression.

“Doesn’t seem particularly safe, then, if there’s a killer hiding among the membership,” Duo said.

 _“If_ there was, Officer Maxwell, then maybe you’d be right.”

Davis stood. He had a few inches on them both. It was just enough to look authoritative as he spoke.

“Officers, the members here are devoted to the word of God. Of all the places to search for a murderer, a church that does such good work in the community, plagued though it is with poverty, with crime… this is not the place for it. The people here are good people.”

“You know,” Duo said then, “Luis wasn’t the first to get killed this way. There was another murder before that, too, a few weeks ago. Fits the same pattern. I wonder if your church had its Night of Light around then, also.”

“It is possible. But I can’t help you with any more information than that. I just don’t know anything else.”

No, he couldn’t help, Heero thought. There was nothing to go off of here. Just a possible window of opportunity, and a match to the profile. But that wasn’t enough for any kind of conviction, not even a warrant. They were dead in the water.

Duo, it seemed, was not ready to come to the same conclusion.

“You know, Father, when I was kid, there were some disappearances, too. Street kids, like me. They found the bodies tossed in the garbage. It’s strange, don’t you think? How it’s started happening again?”

For a long while, Davis didn’t speak. He looked to Heero, then to Duo, tilting his head back like he was getting a good look at him for the first time. His voice was that same, soft cadence when he spoke again.

“Come to think of it… I think I _do_ remember you, Officer. You always had hair like that, didn’t you? There was a boy who used to come around when we fed the children who had hair like yours. He had a friend, an older boy with short brown hair.”

Heero could tell, in the way Duo’s hands clenched, that he was talking about Solo. And that this interview had just come to an abrupt end.

“I do hope you find the man you’re looking for,” Davis said.

“We’ll be in touch, Father,” Duo said, glancing at Heero, his eyes hard-edged.

They walked out of the church and back to the car in silence. The sun was half-set now, glaring orange against the westward windows of the church and surrounding buildings, making Heero blink against the harsh light. Long shadows curled out into the street. Whichever meager street lights that weren’t burnt out or missing began to flicker on.

Heero started the car wordlessly and pulled out of the lot. He wanted to put distance between them and the Drain, for now, distance between Duo and his reaction to Davis remembering his murdered friend.

Heero liked to think he had a good read of people, spending so much of his time speaking to them in pursuit of crime. If Davis were a murderer, recalling a past victim, rubbing it in the face of that victim’s friend, Heero couldn’t discern any of it.

It bothered him, that his senses were telling him they had nothing, that Davis was not worried about being considered a suspect because he hadn’t done anything wrong. That they had followed Duo’s instincts down the wrong rabbit hole, all of this a waste of time.

Duo spent a long time staring out of the window, watching the steadily deepening shadows overtake the city, lights blinking on as they passed. The mask of the interview slipped, now that they were alone together, and Heero could feel Duo’s seething anger before he had spoken a word.

“That son of a bitch,” Duo said finally, not to Heero’s surprise. “Saying a goddamn thing about Solo. He has no right.”

“Duo…”

“You know what’s funny? I wasn’t sure, for a minute, that it was really him. I mean, he fits the profile, he was here at the right time. But he wasn’t really giving me anything to work with, you know? But then he said that shit about Solo, and I just _knew_. I felt it.”

“Maybe,” Heero said, diplomatically. Trying, as hard as he could, to believe Duo was right. “But we don’t have anything to go off of for the case. No judge is going to issue a warrant on what we have.”

Duo laughed without mirth.

“Don’t need one.”

He pulled something small out of his pocket, turning it in his hands. The innocuous, slim device looked like a phone, but Heero knew it wasn’t. Knew that if Duo turned it on, he would hear the crackling of static as the line on the wire went live, transmitting whatever sounds it picked up to the receiver in Duo’s hands.

Heero bit down so hard he tasted blood. All he could say at first was:

“When?”

“When we walked in the office. Came in behind you, slipped it into his coat.”

Before they even talked to the guy. The whole interview, all of it, merely a pretext. Duo had bugged the guy before he had said a word to him.

It was a testament to Heero’s temper that he didn’t crash the car, but he couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice as he spoke.

“Duo, what the _fuck_?”

A tiny mote of that seething anger turned his way.

“Don’t _what the fuck_ me, Yuy. I had to do it.”

“No, you didn’t,” Heero said, his jaw painfully clenched.

“You said it yourself, we’d never get a warrant on what we have.”

“We’re not getting a warrant on illegally obtained evidence, either. Or a conviction. Or _anything_. Do you realize what you did?”

Duo didn’t respond, didn’t even look over at Heero. Heero’s grip on the steering wheel felt hard enough to tear the leather off it as he continued in the face of Duo’s infuriating silence.

“Let’s say this guy is the culprit, Duo. Let’s say we catch him, and they discover that you _bugged_ him. _Illegally_. What the fuck happens then? A violation against the department, and a completely destroyed case. That trial is done. You’ll be kicked off the force!”

At minimum. If the media didn’t find out. Because if they got wind of the eighth precinct violating the civil rights of a _priest_ , Duo was liable to get thrown in prison just to get the head off Une.

“I don’t care about a fucking trial,” Duo spat, “or the fucking police. If they had been doing _their_ jobs twenty years ago I wouldn’t have had to do what I did.”

“Then tell me, Duo, just what the fuck you _do_ care about!”

“I care about stopping him,” he said evenly, his voice low. “I care about making sure he never touches another kid again.”

He had no intention, Heero realized, of letting this go to court.

The implication of Duo’s words hit Heero in a sickening wave, and this time he really did pull the car into a passing lot, tires screeching in protest, hauling the transmission into park and whirling to face Duo.

“Duo, you’re not going to do this. Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not.”

Duo stared back at him, saying nothing, his mouth a hard line. The resolve in his expression was terrifying. It knocked the anger out of Heero and replaced it with sick fear.

“Please, Duo.” Heero found himself pleading now. “Please tell me you aren’t going to do this.”

Because if Duo was going after him himself, he was going to kill him. And all Heero’s fears would be proven true.

“The guy’s barely in his forties,” Duo said, his voice a dangerous whisper. “How many years does he have ahead of him, to keep torturing and killing kids? Twenty? Thirty?”

“So you’re going to become a vigilante? A murderer yourself?”

“I told you, Heero. I became a police officer to find this monster and stop him.”

“A police officer _obeys_ the _law_. Do you even care about that? Do you care about becoming a criminal? A killer?”

He could tell the words _criminal_ and _killer_ registered with Duo. He shook his head against Heero’s words, still fighting back.

“You can’t say his death wouldn’t be justified. I know you can’t say that!”

“Every murderer thinks their murders are justified.”

They stared at each other in the darkness. It had truly turned to night in the city now, and the lot was deserted and dark. Duo’s eyes were shards of black glass as he glared at Heero, like he was his adversary for daring to pull him back from the brink of self-destruction. Heero, even through his anger, his fear, longed to pull Duo against him, to tell him they would find a way to bring the killer to justice, that Duo didn’t have to sacrifice himself to get his monster off the streets. If he would only listen. If he would only trust Heero, trust that they could do it together.

“Duo, we’ll stop him. You and me. You said you couldn’t do it without me, right?”

Suddenly, Duo was blinking hard and turning away to stare out of the passenger window.

“You don’t know what it feels like, Heero. I’ve been chasing this ghost for twenty years.”

“I know that I don’t know. But I said I would help you catch him, and I will. I promise. I swear to you, Duo, okay? You don’t have to do this.”

There was so much he wanted to add, so much he could say. He loved Duo so much he thought it might kill him. If Duo crossed the line, if he was taken from him forever, he didn’t know what he would do. Probably spend the rest of his life hating himself for not being able to do something to stop it.

So he would stop it. He had to.

Duo didn’t say anything for a long time, turning the receiver over and over in his hands. Finally, he shoved it into his coat pocket, looking back over to Heero. The edges of his gaze were softer, the fury gone and replaced with resignation.

“You’re right, Heero. God damn it. I hate when you’re fucking right.”

Heero’s hand hovered over the gear shift. He wanted so badly to believe him. He thought of Duo slipping the device into Davis’s coat without telling him, though, and stopped himself.

He had to hear it from Duo. Out loud.

“Duo, promise me you aren’t going to do anything you can’t take back.”

Duo turned back to the window.

“Okay. Yeah.”

“Promise me,” Heero pushed.

Duo reached out to put his hand on Heero’s leg.

“I promise.”

Did Duo mean what he was saying? Or was he pretending to have changed his mind, so Heero wouldn’t drive right to the station, like he should, and turn him in right now?

Heero couldn’t tell anymore.

_Sorry, Noin, I can’t do it._

He drove them back to his apartment, let Duo use his shower first. Let him reach for him in the bathroom after, towel low around his hips, hair still wet and skin still flushed, as Heero brushed his teeth and avoided his own reflection. Let him unbutton his shirt, lead him to the bedroom, climb on top of him in Heero’s bed and ride him until they were both shaking and clutching wildly at each other. Let Duo curl up in his arms after, calm again, soothed, smelling like sex and Heero’s shampoo.

And somewhere, in the pile of clothes they both left on the floor, the receiver to the bug Duo had left in the bishop’s coat still lay, switched off.

“I got a good look at the calendar back at the church,” Duo said. “The next Night of Light is this Saturday. We’ll know everywhere Davis goes, this time. We’ll be able to stop him if he tries to hurt another kid.”

Heero wrapped his arms around Duo and tried to believe that he’d meant it when he’d promised he wouldn’t let it go too far. That he would stop himself in time. Because God knew that when Saturday came, Heero would be right there in the Drain beside him, chasing Davis into the dark, hoping as much as Duo did that he was right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with this story! The next chapter is looking to be loooong, but very eventful...


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